Maybe they’re trying to catch a bus? What they call “hail and ride” in England?
Heil and ride.
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Sounds like my lunch 
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“People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans.” - Prince Philip
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Right. In its place and time, reactionary movements usually were emphatically monarchist, so it’s not surprising that members of the royal family might have liked the idea of brutal reactionaries crushing workers and restoring them to their old supremacy.
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If you’re alarmed by this video, it will really blow your mind to learn that Adolph Hitler was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938.
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I remember reading about David’s The Oath of the Horatii and thinking, “So that’s why they Nazis saluted like that.” It’s really very unlikely that the painting was their inspiration, but it would be funny if it were, David being a French painter.
To be fair, that was referring more to his influence than his being someone to look up to. Stalin was man of the year twice in the next five years.
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Many Scots and Irish see the royalty as fascists, because of centuries of repression. So pics like these are nothing new, to them.
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Don’t tell anyone but William the Conqueror was a bastard
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Quoting for emphasis. That’s exactly how I see it, too. As hard as it is to witness the blatant reminders, I find the way Germany embodies “never forget” in daily life to be a wise cultural/political choice. There’s a reason hate groups are a much bigger problem in the US and UK.
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It’s in his name.
Guillaume le Bâtard
I was. I didn’t know that, but was it actually enforced? It’s not like everyone actually was in the Hitler Youth.
Well I don’t think it’s in any way unreasonable to query the youth of a man who set himself up as the moral and spiritual leader of a billion people. I would expect that they would be capable, as a leader, to resist immoral orthodoxy. At the very least I would expect it to be a source of lasting shame and self examination. Which I didn’t really see signs of in the public utterances that I encountered. He seems to have absolved himself of it rather easily as something everyone did.
And given that his job for the previous pope was the rigid enforcer of orthodoxy as defined from above, the whole doesn’t really add up to a good look, does it?
Oh yeah, all that’s right on the mark. Hence, my comment about how it wasn’t just the German’s discussing the “Jewish problem”. In fact, lots of places were kind of worse for Jews prior to the rise of Hitler in Germany… France comes to mind (the Dreyfus Affair) as does pre-communist Russia (which explains why some Jews did support the Bolsheviks there). But certainly, the nazis gave the anger some direction, but many Germans, like many Europeans, already imagined the Jews as a group of outsiders, who didn’t “belong” in Europe… the language between then and now astounds me (as someone up thread I think here mentioned), but this time aimed as supposedly “foreign Muslims”. But at the time, lots of people really thought “hitler had a few good ideas”. But there were those, not just Jews, who thought Hitler was shite, too. They tended to be Jews, communists, or political radicals on the left, though, not people the people in power agreed with and took seriously. Likely, yet another reason that Stalin was able to dominate the global communist movement more so than he should have been able to. Fascism, which had a strong sense of national cohesion, fit better with their idea of how a nation-state should look. I’ve always thought the notion that there was something weird about Germany, the “Sonderweg” thesis, was just flat out wrong and gave postwar Germans a pass in order to rebuild for the Cold War…
So… we agree on this point, then!
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Well, but I think you’re seeing it through the eyes of having gone past it, vs. how people might have seen it at the time. Honestly, I haven’t read much on interwar Europe, but I suspect that there’d be much more circumspection regarding the second world war, given the first world war and it’s toll. But it’s also true that the end of the war really meant the end of empire for Britain. Even so, there was likely some who thought war was a positive at the outset, given the economic conditions before the war started…
This. This is why we get the historiography in German history known as the “Sonderweg”, which imagines that the Holocaust could have only happened in Germany, at that time, because of… special reasons. It basically ignores the interconnections between Euroepan imperialism more broadly and the rise of the Nazis as a European colonial power IN Europe itself. it simultaneously lets them off the hook, and pins the blame for the slaughter only on them, ignoring the very real violence done in (especially) Frances and Englands imperial holdings. For some “never again” meant never another round of attempted genocide. For others, “never again” simply meant never again the Jews as being killed by Germans (hence right wing support for Zionism).
Only if you’re completely and utterly oblivious to the selection process for Time’s person of the year cover.
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From what I remember from my German history, it was at first highly encouraged, then later enforced. But as the war ground on, they began to take teenage boys to the front lines, instead of making them join the HY.
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Nope. He was born as a Prince of Greece and Denmark, but that would be his “job description”. He’s a member of House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg from his father’s side and his mother is a Battenberg/Mountbatten. Both houses are old German dynasties. I guess that would make him more German than anything, whatever that means in the weird cross-breeding world of European nobility.
