Fuck revisionist history

[Admiral Valdemar]

It's not just eugenics; there were a lot of cultural similarities between pre-WW2 USA and Germany that nobody in the US wants to acknowledge. Hitler had plenty of admirers on this side of the pond at one time.

For that matter, most of the Commonwealth countries did not look too harshly upon the man so long as he was "only" persecuting Jews instead of invading other western European countries.

Hitler did get the idea of concentration camps off the British and their dealings in India and Africa with unruly, newly annexed servants to the Crown.

[Haruko]

It's not just eugenics; there were a lot of cultural similarities between pre-WW2 USA and Germany that nobody in the US wants to acknowledge. Hitler had plenty of admirers on this side of the pond at one time.

Coincidentally, here's a case related to that point found in a passage I read today in pp. 444-445, ch. 19 ("America", 1933—1939) of Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe:

In retrospect, the rise of the Nazis created a fundamental moral challenge for America. At the time, however, this was not so clear. That was especially true in Princeton, which was a conservative town, and at its university, which harbored a surprising number of students who shared the amorphous anti-Semitic attitude found among their social class. A survey of incoming freshmen in 1938 produced a result that is now astonishing, and should have been back then as well: Adolf Hitler polled highest as the "greatest living person." Albert Einstein was second.

[PeZook]

Oh, man. There's a lot of that shit. Just off the top of my head:

1) Ukrainian rampage: While the Polish Republic of the XVIth century is always portrayed as a very tolerant country, we could be pretty fucking violent when putting down Cossack uprisings in the Ukraine. Literally entire villages were hanged because of trivial shit - but hey, they were dirty rebels, right?

2) Belarussian forced military colonization: Never even mentioned in school. In the 1920s, Poland instituted a mass colonization program in Western Belarussia in an attempt to displace ethnic belarussians. Military families were given homes and land, sometimes taken by force from Belarussian owners.

In school history, if the period is touched at all, it's usually the belarussians who are portrayed as the bad guys.

3) The invasion of Czechoslovakia (1938): Man, that was petty. We literally threw away the only chance of stopping Nazi Germany in 1939 for an insignificant territorial gain in Zaolzie. For the entire interwar period, Poland was locked in a bitter feud with Czechoslovakia over this and other petty grievances.

4) Poland's flirt with Nazism: Seems like Nazism was more popular before WWII than most people like to admit. Ever heard Stas mentioning the Polish-German anti-soviet crusade? Yeah, that was a real possibility. Fortunately, only for a short time. Thank God.

5) Anti-semitism: We really don't like to admit that yes, Poles could be irrational, hate-driven killers. Just try to mention the rampant anti-semitism in interwar Poland, and you get people offended.

My very own grand-grandmother, for example, repeated the myth that Jews needed blood of children to make their matsa. Polish children, of course.

[K. A. Pital]

My very own grand-grandmother, for example, repeated the myth that Jews needed blood of children to make their matsa. Polish children, of course.

stunner

Hitler did get the idea of concentration camps off the British and their dealings in India and Africa with unruly, newly annexed servants to the Crown.

Yeah, Hitler admired the British Empire a lot, as well as it's methods of colonial rule.

[PeZook]

My very own grand-grandmother, for example, repeated the myth that Jews needed blood of children to make their matsa. Polish children, of course.

stunner

Isn't it? At least one pogrom in Kielce was only possibly because people shared such retarded attitudes. This particular pogrom was probably inspired by the security apparatus, but:

1) The nation breeds its leaders. Jews were no particular threat to the post-war Polish government, so the only reason for raging anti-semitism was...irrational raging anti-semitism.

2) It would be far, far harder to inspire a pogrom if people wouldn't be inclined to believe bullshit about Jews drinking blood of Polish children

This particular skeleton is just about the worst one ; Because Poles like to see their history in black-and-white, and I don't think anybody likes to admit their ancestors may have been raging assholes.

[K. A. Pital]

4) Moral decline in the Tsar Russia army, and it's practices, including brutal beatings of soldiers, homosexual rape by superiors (under homosexuality criminalized!)

What?! That happened? I've never heard that.

Heheh. Yeah, that's not a favourite theme, especially among "Tsar Russia was sooo awsum!" wankers. But technically, there's a lot of shit:
Since Peter the Great and before 1870s, the Russian Army employed the practice of whipping soldiers for disciplinary failures of various scale. The limits could be over 5000 stick-whips. The commanders could also be brutally whipped, with limits of 3000-1500 sticks. (A stick whip is a fresh, green tree branch which is stripped and then used as a whip - the strength of the strike was such that skin often tore apart, leaving the behinds covered in blood).

After 1870, the number of strikes was reduced from the atrociously high limits to 50, however, it was still in practice until the war with Japan.

Most of the Tsarist war makers - generals and ministers - were ardently in favour of that however.

In fact, one of the factors in the failure of the "white army" (the pro-monarchy and anti-communist/socialist forces in the Civil War) was the informal continuation of that deplorable practice, where superior brutally mauled soldiers, treated them as subhumans (which was common for the russian nobility) and trash, often resulting in mass desertions or morale breakdown and total decline of discipline.

As for rapes, it was often that a noblemen or officer in the Tsarist Army raped his platoon. Those facts were covered up as the Tsarist code criminalized homosexuality. The soldiers weren't really allowed to appeal to anybody. This was ubiquotous, especially in the Russian Empire forces around the Caucasian. The reports from too vigilant superiors were eventually turned down in the highest circles, as they didn't want to lose "able officers over such little fuss" (as raping entire platoons of their underlings), since "what should they do if there's no women". Yeah.

Not often you hear about that shit, because "Tsar and Orthodoxy!" morons are so totally whitewashing imperial Russia that you can see the last Tsar - who's quite certainly a murderous dick and imperialist warmonger - already canonized as a holy man

[Illuminatus Primus]

I knew about the gauntlet and absurd medieval justice in the relatively late era Russian Army, but I didn't know Army officers felt free to rape their troops en masse. Jesus Christ.

[K. A. Pital]

That thing was kind of obscured, because if it were well-known, people would find it easier to understand, and sympathize with soldiers and sailors who supported the October Revolution, mass shot their officers, on both ships and land, and formed voluntary rebel command groups. But if you need to present the Revolution as totally a foreign influence from evil bolsheviks, you don't need all those pesky facts about the plight of Russian soldiers in the army... they might convince someone that it was kind of justified to lynch the officers

From the memoirs of a battaltion commander:

In the first days of my command of this battalion, I found a picant incident in one of the companies, which had a particular coleur locale; in this company, an aboriginal unter-officer, held by the unnatural vice [remember, historically homosexuality was still seen as a devil's sin], raped young soldiers from his platoon. The regiment commander reported it to me orally, for some reason avoiding an official report, and told me that such sins were happening earlier in the regiment. To myself, uncommon to such caucasian traditions, this event seemed a great crime. Conducting a personal investigation and having uncovered all as it was, I personally reported to my superiors, asking for the unter to be court-martialled.

The following events saddened me even more than the fact of a platoon being turned into a harem for it's commander. A Grand Duke (Velikiy Knyaz) arrived at White Springs (Beliy Kliuch) for a common inspection. After the inspection I receive a note to arrive before his highness for discussing matters of service. In the company of the regiment commander, colonel Sulikovsky, he starts a speech:
- Why, colonel, do you report about this unter-officer story? It's inconvenient to start a fuss when the 200-jubilee is closing in. Take your report back. It seems such stories are alien to you; we, however, are already accustomed to them. Do you know that last year in my division not just an unter, but a commander of the Tiflis regiment, colonel Popov, was caught with the same crime: he raped the messengers and ordinares sent to him every day on duty. I was pretty much ready to forgive him those little excesses - he was a brave commander. But this history was made public. I had to fire him from the army. But you know what Kuropatkin told me in Petersburg? He said you're losing a good commander in vain; this little mischief is of no importance, which he was caught in. In Turkestan during the conquest, many, many have been doing this - "holding boys". And what would they do without women? But we must wage war. And "without a woman a man is like a machine without steam".

Of course, after that the deal with the unter-officer ended with nothing. I just transferred him to another company.

[Broomstick]

My very own grand-grandmother, for example, repeated the myth that Jews needed blood of children to make their matsa. Polish children, of course.

stunner

I ran into a couple of Polish immigrants in the 1980's - nice, congenial grandmotherly types - who absolutely still believed that lie. And a bunch of other horseshit.

I don't get Tsar-worship... but then, the Russian half of my family left Russia around 1900 in order to escape the abuse and pogroms and other shit that was considered normal back then. Oddly enough, the brutality may have benefited them in the long run in a bizarre sort of way - if it had not been that bad they wouldn't have come to the US and they would have had the same fate of the relatives who didn't leave and were still in Eastern Europe for the Nazis to exterminate when they came through.

[PeZook]

I ran into a couple of Polish immigrants in the 1980's - nice, congenial grandmotherly types - who absolutely still believed that lie. And a bunch of other horseshit.

A picture perfect description of my great grandmother

She was the stereotypical nice little old lady. She raised five children by herself, never complained, was very hard working and our family generally loved her very much. A real senior figure.

Now she's dead, and I learnt more about views she held in life just recently.

You can imagine my shock, but ridiculous beliefs about Jews are not exactly uncommon here.

[Edi]

Stas, thanks for those bits about Russian history. Put a lot of things to persepctive for me, especially since I just read The Road of the Sickle and Hammer and started on The Bells of the Kremlin by Arvo Tuominen, who was a bigshot in the Finnish Communist Party in the 1920s and knew or met Lenin, Zinovyev, Bukharin and many of the other communist leaders of the time. He later rejected communism and wrote those books precisely to show what his story was and why came to the conclusions he did. Those books have probably never been translated from Finnish, but the cognitive dissonance I was getting was making my head explode.

Then Stalin's invasions during WW2 and all the political shenanigans and shit with communists and leftists and everything else, have made it an article of faith that all the communist leaders were bloodsucking monsters. When you mix that in with our historical hatred of Russia due to being used as a battlefield between Russia and Sweden, no wonder I was getting that dissonance. So Tsarist Russia and Communist Soviet Union were eventually just as bad from our point of view, but at least I now have a lot more sympathy for the October revolutionaries for doing what they did, even though they fucked it all up afterward.

Doesn't help that Finland has its own ugly bits of suppressed history (not so greatly revised, just suppressed until recently). After our civil war, the Whites perpetrated a fair number of atrocities against the Reds in revenge. All told about 7500 Whites dies in the war, compared to nearly twice as many Reds, but 20,000 more Reds perished in prison camps afterward and it's been a taboo subject until just the past two decades.

The most recent shit that has been kept too quiet is Mauno Koivisto's complete fucking subservience to Russia and his outright incompetence in so many things. He was opposed to Baltic secession, which alone qualifies him for being good only to be spit upon, but that wasn't nearly the end of it. There was a book about some of the shit he pulled published just a few weeks ago and the political establishment is making one ridiculous sounding excuse after another and claiming they didn't know anything. Right, and I can make a customer's brain fry just by thinking angry thoughts at them over the phone...

Some less recent revisionism that is fortunately being reversed is the denial of the role the Germans, especially certain Luftwaffe units played in the defense of the Karelian Isthmus during the war. One squadron was absolutely instrumental in several important cases or things would have gone worse for us.

Then there's the normal eugenics and forced sterilization shit the Swedes had, but perhaps not quite in such a large extent...

[Aaron]

[*]In March of 1993, members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment captured the Somali teenager Shidane Arone and tortured him sadistically for hours before he expired. It was later revealed that some involved had affiliations with racist movements.[/list]

That's really all that comes to mind for me.

That's small potatoes compared to the near systematic rape of woman in the military in the eighties (when woman were integrated). Virtually every female Pvt posted to 4 Brigade's Field Ambulance unit was raped in the 80's.

[K. A. Pital]

Doesn't help that Finland has its own ugly bits of suppressed history (not so greatly revised, just suppressed until recently). After our civil war, the Whites perpetrated a fair number of atrocities against the Reds in revenge. All told about 7500 Whites dies in the war, compared to nearly twice as many Reds, but 20,000 more Reds perished in prison camps afterward and it's been a taboo subject until just the past two decades.

Weren't Linus Torvalds relatives ardent communists or something, still being angry about the repression that was brought down by the Whites? I recall reading something like that.

Some less recent revisionism that is fortunately being reversed is the denial of the role the Germans

I guess Finland, since 1945 till today, doesn't really like any of the Nazi ties and not a lot of information surfaces up. In Stuart's TBO thread I once brought the tales of Karelian concentration camps, which were a Nuremberg matter for all it's worth. I doubt you hear a lot about that now, however.

So Tsarist Russia and Communist Soviet Union were eventually just as bad from our point of view, but at least I now have a lot more sympathy for the October revolutionaries for doing what they did, even though they fucked it all up afterward.

Octobrists weren't that "utopian" in foreign policy, actually, and they stuck to the principles of self-determination, for better or worse, letting the Russian Empire lands to fall free.

There's a lot more stuff which I posted about the Russian and Soviet history: for example Soviet Industrialization (details the changes of society from Lenin to Stalin and beyond) and formation of the USSR, part 1 and 2

[Edi]

Doesn't help that Finland has its own ugly bits of suppressed history (not so greatly revised, just suppressed until recently). After our civil war, the Whites perpetrated a fair number of atrocities against the Reds in revenge. All told about 7500 Whites dies in the war, compared to nearly twice as many Reds, but 20,000 more Reds perished in prison camps afterward and it's been a taboo subject until just the past two decades.

Weren't Linus Torvalds relatives ardent communists or something, still being angry about the repression that was brought down by the Whites? I recall reading something like that.

Quite possible. I don't know that frankly.

Some less recent revisionism that is fortunately being reversed is the denial of the role the Germans

I guess Finland, since 1945 till today, doesn't really like any of the Nazi ties and not a lot of information surfaces up.

Finland's relationship with Nazi Germany is a difficult subject to discuss. Not because we want to deny it, but because with foreigners it too often comes down to "You were full blown nazis too". We took help when it was offered but ran our own war for the most part, though those certain elements fought with us and were important, more so than they have gotten credit for. At the same time the Finnish government didn't agree with the policies of Nazi Germany, but there wasn't a whole lot that we could do about that. Rock and a hard place... Between Finns it is no big deal to talk about these things, but with foreigners the discussion always includes so many qualifiers and sidetracks it becomes tedious.

In Stuart's TBO thread I once brought the tales of Karelian concentration camps, which were a Nuremberg matter for all it's worth. I doubt you hear a lot about that now, however.

Ah, the Karelian concentration camps. They're not unknown here, I just forgot to include them in that post becuase I was focusing too much on the 1910s and 1920s and then the more recent shit after WW2. Yep, the fuckwits who were going on about Greater Finland and what they did to the people in Russian Karelia was completely unacceptable. Wouldn't mind at all if some of them had been shot or hanged. There were a couple of books about that in the past few years too that got pretty big publicity. And not the kind of angry denial so often seen in such cases. Most of the public here still has enough spine and guts to feel shame for what happened when confronted with it.

So Tsarist Russia and Communist Soviet Union were eventually just as bad from our point of view, but at least I now have a lot more sympathy for the October revolutionaries for doing what they did, even though they fucked it all up afterward.

Octobrists weren't that "utopian" in foreign policy, actually, and they stuck to the principles of self-determination, for better or worse, letting the Russian Empire lands to fall free.

Didn't last long, though, thanks to comrade Stalin. Somebody ought to have strangled him in the cradle. Based on Tuominen's writings, I tend to agree with you here, but the point was that from the Finnish point of view, little good has ever come out of Russia. The reign of Alexander II being an exception and we didn't mind Nikolai I too much either because they left us alone for the most part.

There's a lot more stuff which I posted about the Russian and Soviet history: for example Soviet Industrialization (details the changes of society from Lenin to Stalin and beyond) and formation of the USSR, part 1 and 2

I'll take a look at that sometime. Thanks.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

Broomstick, I know it's a tough subject to air, so thank you for doing so.

I did it in part because to far too many people it's something in the history books, not someone they know. Except, since a lot of the people this was done to are still alive, they almost certainly DO know someone who was affected. Those laws were on the books through the 1960's and even in to the 1970's in some places.

Holy shite! Who what and why? I've never heard of this happening before. Was it a racial or purely health thing?

[Aaron]

Holy shite! Who what and why? I've never heard of this happening before. Was it a racial or purely health thing?

I can't speak for the US specific reasons but many countries (right up to the mid 70's) sterilised their mentally or physically impaired. The mental cases were done so they wouldn't breed in institutions, where apperently the bushes were always moving. I have no idea why they would do the physically impaired, I don't recall Canada doing it (that I've heard).

[Broomstick]

Holy shite! Who what and why? I've never heard of this happening before. Was it a racial or purely health thing?

Pure eugenics - elimination of the "undesirable". Of course you haven't heard of this, it's not covered in the history classes you get at school.

The categories included, but were not limited to:

1) The epileptic and "feeble-minded" - the epileptic and retarded were lumped together in many respects. Although there is some overlap, certainly not all epileptics are retarded. The fear was that such traits would be passed on to offspring. The stupidity was that no distinction was made between, say, epilepsy that appeared for no known reason early in life and epilepsy arising from a head injury after one was adult.

2) People with mental illness.

3) Various birth defects of all sorts - it was believed by any that ALL birth defects were genetic. We now know this is not true. My husband's problem is strongly associated with folic acid deficiency in the mother, and indeed his mother was underfed and poorly nourished most of her life.

4) Welfare cases - the idea that somehow poverty was genetically based. As described in prior posts, this would sometimes take the form of pressuring pregnant poor women under partial anesthesia to sign away their reproductive organs. In the US, this even took the form of not only sterilizing the mother, but also sterilizing their child in infancy. The egregious abuse that occurred under these laws is breath-taking and precisely why it is so damn difficult to order involuntary sterilization today, and why calls to force sterilization/abortion/birth control on the poor today are met with almost hysterical resistance in some quarters.

Whether a person was institutionalized was irrelevant - people fully capable of functioning in society, who were able to take care of themselves and hold jobs and live on their own, were sterilized against their will. Often, as I said, it would happen in infancy or childhood and these people were simply never told that it was done.

Justification was "for the good of society" or "for the good of the patient".

People at all levels of society were affected, including the rich and influential, but of course the odds of you falling under these laws increased with poverty and minority status (race or religion). Being an immigrant or of an immigrant family didn't help either. A wealthy family might be able to move to a state with less draconian laws, or to find a doctor willing to alter a diagnosis to escape mandatory sterilization. The poor were simply fucked, as usual, as were various minorities. Women were disproportionally affected as well although, as my husband's case shows, men were certainly sterilized as well.

The information is out there - you just have to dig a little bit.

[Eleas]

Then there's the annexation of Scania (Skåne) from Denmark in the 1670s, which heaped atrocities upon the civilian populace. Us Scanians now consider ourselves Swedes, and tend to be unaware of the fact that we were essentially treated like any civilian population in a mercenary-based war. Of course, nowhere in history class does the similarity of the Scanian wars to, say, the Balkans come up.

[TC Pilot]

The "state" of the historical community is actually a fairly unusual one at the moment. The much more traditional "empirical" history of the 19th and early 20th centuries that focused on the winners in history (as in, whites, Europeans, upper classes, and men) have in general been undermined by a surge of post-modern relativist Foucault-worshippers (it's almost as if they're straight out of 1984) intent on race, class, and gender.

This has caused a distinct split in history writing, with professional, leftist, relativist historians dominating universities and scholarly posts, and mainstream writers writing the "popular history" most people read. The latter historians often fall victim to all the usual revisionist issues, whereas the new "relativists" often end up going so far in bashing the "winners" that they gloss over all the victims' faults (Japan was just the innocent victim of American racism and imperialism during World War II, honest! )

[Illuminatus Primus]

[*]In March of 1993, members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment captured the Somali teenager Shidane Arone and tortured him sadistically for hours before he expired. It was later revealed that some involved had affiliations with racist movements.[/list]

That's really all that comes to mind for me.

That's small potatoes compared to the near systematic rape of woman in the military in the eighties (when woman were integrated). Virtually every female Pvt posted to 4 Brigade's Field Ambulance unit was raped in the 80's.

Jesus. Cover-up and the works? How far did it go up? What happened?

[Aaron]

Jesus. Cover-up and the works? How far did it go up? What happened?

Well basically woman where accepted into the CF in the early eighties. Not everyone was happy about this, cue the rapes. Despite incidents such as a WO being fired from a Brigade HQ for telling a female to "pass the wine, cunt" at a Mess Dinner, there wasn't much done at the lower levels to help them integrate. The Field Amb case was a bunch of Master Corporals deciding to "break in" the troops because, well everyone else was doing it. No one dared to call the MP's because they were told by their superiors that it would go bad for them, career ending suff. Plus they were in Germany so options were limited for these woman on what to do.

A bunch committed suicide and a shitload got out. Someone finally filed a report with the MP's a few years ago when an incident blew it open. There hasn't been any progress on it in a year, it's basically at a stand still unless others come forward.

It took about a decade and a half for things to truely change in regards to acceptance of woman. And thankfully it's down to an average of a rape a year (that's reported).

[K. A. Pital]

mainstream writers writing the "popular history" most people read

If most people read bullshit, that's bad. But most people also watch bullshit on TV, and speak bullshit too. All too sad.

[HemlockGrey]

Another thing we can thank the Soviet Union for is utterly fucking up the cause of the Republicans in Spain. Good job guys!

It's not just eugenics; there were a lot of cultural similarities between pre-WW2 USA and Germany that nobody in the US wants to acknowledge. Hitler had plenty of admirers on this side of the pond at one time.

Ford and General Motors both sold trucks and other vehicles to the Spanish fascists. Hell, there may have been a (half-assed) plot by business leaders to oust FDR in a military coup.

[TC Pilot]

If most people read bullshit, that's bad. But most people also watch bullshit on TV, and speak bullshit too. All too sad.

It's not neccesarily "bullshit," just your very typical subject matter. There can be as much intellectual dishonesty in a relativist's "Plight of the [Insert Disenfranchised Race/Class/Gender] in [Insert Time Period]" as a mainstreamer's "Lincoln: The Story You've Heard a Thousand Times Over" or "World War II: America Rocks." You're just going to sell a lot better when you write about the latter, rather than the former.

[K. A. Pital]

It's not neccesarily "bullshit," just your very typical subject matter.

If you're dividing mainstream history and academic history, you're pretty well aware that the latter has academic standards - the use of sources, archival evidence, and so on.

Popular history books may be chock full of urban legends and bullshit - but due to them being so remote from academic history, and lacking any kind of peer review process, or any standards of evidence, which are pretty rigorous, especially for XIX-XX century history... they still sell well.

"Intellectual dishonesty" in academic history is very hard to smuggle - any way you're only going to show what your historic data shows - not more and not less, unless you unwittingly or deliberately lie somewhere, or express a lack of rigor.

Most pop history is a heap of lies and huge generalizations from those lies. This way you get "super interesting book about X!!! read it now". Sadly the professional historic community is pretty remote from it all; they're pretty bad at popularizing.