>>2878411My bad, was unsure as to whether it would be fine to present it in English or not since I didn’t want to shit up this thread with more English, but I needed AI to translate it to German. Oh well, here’s the English text based on my wording (no AI this time):
I remember that back in 2021 American media was abuzz with drama over the poster above that was used for the Alliance 90/The Greens in the elections. What many of the American and anglophone commentators omitted is that the poster was specifically just for Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, and that unlike American and other European parties, German parties are often more localist so the platform of the same party can vary even between boroughs, or at least that’s how a German neo-nazi put it back then. That meant that different parts of the party would be more conservative than the others, even the Greens.
Said neo-nazi (that nicknamed himself Arminius) in a forum I lurked to back in that day would go on to state that the use of English language in that poster wasn’t accidental, since the stigma on German nationalism outside of sports has meant that many German leftists would adopt English and American neologisms to look “cool”, while German advertising and managerial boards would adopt English to make themselves look professional and appeal to a wide berth of people. He then stated that he felt pessimistic about the future of Germany as not only were local dialects going extinct, but he thought that Germany of the future would turn into a multiracial hellhole where German would become extinct and be replaced by some anglicised version of it. A Creole language, in other words.
There was also another neo-nazi (who nicknamed himself Staufer) who would go on a tangent on how obsessed everyday Germans could be with America, with some even adopting weird habits like watching the Super Bowl, or follow US politics (mostly AOC and Bernie Sanders) to the point that they thought the world would end if the “dumb Americans” (as those Germans would put it) voted for Trump again (remember, we are talking about 2021 in this case), so there’s that. That German neo-nazi was often the one to push back against American right-wing misconceptions of modern Germany and delusions about nazi Germany, but only insofar that:
- Germany was less “pozzed” than the USA (back then “woke” wasn’t widely used as it is now) since Germany urbanisation followed a different path from the American one where large cities gradually transitioned into villages as you travelled away from urban centres, and it was there that Germany’s conservative elements lived in. Hence why trans people aren’t as prominent in Germany compared to the USA. Said urban structure is also why German large cities are far less populated (e.g., Berlin being far less populous than London, Paris and Moscow) but Germany still has higher population density than America and Russia, besides the obvious fact that the green revolution and the Haber Bosch process allowed for the expansion of the German population to the point of Germany becoming the most populous nation in Europe proper. This, and the traditional centralised German urbanisation model is also why German industries are less centralised as companies like Volkswagen typically get their spare parts from contractors located in other cities.
- Nazi Germany wasn’t some paradise as American neo-Nazis believe. The user Staufer would argue that if any of these neo-Nazis actually bothered to talk to German people they would realise that many of the Germans in the 1930s largely accepted Hitler because he improved the German economy but nonetheless some of the nazi policies like the Kristalnacht proved quite controversial. Regarding the treaty of Versailles, he pushed back against the notion that it was cruel by pointing out that the Brest-Livotsk treaty was harsher on Russia than Versailles was on Weimar, especially as military buildup long preceded Hitler’s rise to power since it began under Hindenburg, whom he notes as being beloved by current German liberals as having the potential to have formed the EU if it wasn’t for “anti-democratic forces”. He also pushed back on the notion that millions of German men in the aftermath of WW2 died en masse due to allied inprisonment in open air prison camps since the numbers given out by pro-German revisionists would be too high to account for the number of survivors in official censuses. And while Staufer did deny the Holocaust, he did say the camps did exist, just as labor camps that would have worked well had it not been for allied bombing campaigns.
Staufer also stated that Weimar was much less degenerate than American right-wingers would like to think as said degeneracy that scandalises the current online western right was actually limited to certain urbanite intellectual circles of interwar Berlin (as was the “negrophilia” artistic movement) while the rest of the Weimar Republic (which Staufer notes had “Deutschreich” as its official name) was fairly socially conservative.
But yh, both neo-Nazis were (un)surprisingly pessimistic about Germany’s future, but unlike mainstream German conservatives they didn’t think Germany would end up as a caliphate due to the high assimilation rates among the biggest immigrant diasporas (particularly Turks) and instead they thought Germany would end up as the same “shitlib totalitarian multiracial dystopia” (their words in English, not mine) turned up to 11. They seriously thought societal collapse was the only way to “save” the German nation since they thought most Germans are a lost cause.
Then again, I’m not sure how to take their words at face value, since Arminius in that forum:
- Wrote a misogynistic screed after witnessing two old German coots discussing their promiscuous lives and making casual misandristic remarks, as well as seeing a 14 yo German girl holding hands with her mixed-race Afro-German boyfriend, whilst he took a walk at the park. Oh, and he managed to chase out one of the “German” nazi user in that alt-right forum that I mentioned after he discovered that said user wasn’t a pure German by virtue of having a Russian dad from Kazakhstan. Apparently it’s common for Kazakhs (both mixed race, ethnic Kazakhs, and ethnic Slavs) to claim distant German heritage to exploit the very liberal (at the time, I guess) German right to return law to gain German citizenship, and often instead of integrating they end up ghettoising themselves with other Russians, hence how Arminius discovered the user wasn’t a “pure” German: the user was fluent in Russian and would speak with other Russian users in the same forum.
But yh, that’s how early 2020s internet was. I would like to compare note. So were these Nazis right or wrong about German history and culture then and now?