Bad Germans who were good people. Like Bernard Lichtenberg obm

The phenomenon you described was a feature of agrarian life in early 20th century Roumania. You’re in the wrong country.

You seem to be under the impression that displays of unearned self-confidence persuade people.

Barbarossa was supposed to “kick off” about a month earlier than it actually did. It was delayed because Hitler decided he had to send Wehrmacht units to save Mussolini’s backside from his poorly planned and disastrously executed Balkan/Greek campaign in early 1941.

Seems that the world owes Mussolini a whole lot more than it realizes….

Pretty clear why she had to be cancelled.

Also pre-partition Poland was before the concept of nation state existed. They had a sense of ethnicity or people but not of a national entity. Most US citizens don’t comprehend that the bulk of the world defines themselves by ethnicity or tribe and not a nationality. They are linked by blood and not by concept like we are. That is why there were Volga Germans 200 years after Catherine the Great invited them in to farm. German language newspaper were printed up until the 1930’s before Stalin shut them down. He deported all Germans to Siberia when the war started.

Why so many Jews in Poland/Ukraine or what is called the “Pale”? When Spain booted out Jews after 1492, the King of Poland Sobieski welcomed them with very friendly terms. There was blatant anti-Semitism mainly due to ethnic tensions. Also the Pale Jews became Hasidic after a time which set them apart more.

The Nazi racial ideology rose out of the writings of Houston Chamberlain (not associated with Neville). He got a lot of inspiration from the United States and it’s racial Social Darwinism interpretation as advocated by progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, Margret Sanger, Dewey et al. Read “War against the Weak” by Edwin Black.

All of this was allowed by Enlightenment Humanism that drove God from the public square.

Finally as a personal anecdote I was stationed in Poland from 1997 to 2000 where my plant was 15 miles from Auschwitz. One of the times I took a group the tour guide was a man who as a boy was the first to Auschwitz after the Germans left to look for his older brother and uncle. In his group was Karol Józef Wojty?a or you may know him as John Paul II. There is a picture of a dead woman who just gave birth with the baby still attached to her by umbilical cord. He showed me where she laid. I laid a lit candle there and wept. It was All Souls Day or Halloween here in the US.

I have no sympathy for those who spout excuses for man’s depravity against man. An ancient tradition that was only overthrown by the power of Jesus Christ. Those who fall away from his teachings are those that perpetrate these horrors. Like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin, Al Quada, Hamas and Al Shabab. Yes as Hobbes said in Leviathan “a man’s life is short, hard and brutish” if there are not laws and traditions structured on Christian teachings. But it does not have to be so. Little do the Karen’s and Chad’s understand what will be visited upon them if the Fascists take control.

That is why I fight today to restore those values that Secular Humanism has lost. I will not go quietly into the good night.

I’m having a little rhetorical fun with ‘Comfortably Familiar’ in order to make a point. I would not go so far as to say that we should let it all go and get on with Life, but I am saying that History is headed right at us all like an oncoming train and there is a balance between eyes on the road in front and rear view mirror.

I once saw a Tasmanian Devil in a zoo. It had gone insane in its captivity and ran in circles around and around its enclosure. Its running track was worn a good 10cm deeper than ground level. Not Rilke’s Panther. And we always laugh at generals for being prepared to fight the last war. This upcoming attraction will certainly rhyme with the past… but I’m thinking more contrapuntally… and not sure that this thread is anywhere near the dominant theme. YMMV and and more power to you for that.

Who are “your” people? The “od?”

Do they want you back?

I wouldn’t call anything about the Nazis “comfortably” familiar.

Or even “familiar,” for most people. I’ve been impressed by how little people know about the most basic facts.

I guess I could say that these days about history in general. In fact, a lot of people are more familiar with the future than with the past. Or at least as familiar – meaning, they don’t know squat. And often what they think they know is wrong.

Fair enough. It’s a fertile field for much disputation — little of which bears much direct relevance to where we find ourselves in 2021.

Still, Nazi threads tend to be the longest threads in which we all do our respective bits. What *that* means, is a puzzlement for the ages.

Perhaps the reason is that it’s a comfortingly familiar Known Known where everyone knows their respective parts. We’re all on the Edge of the Unknown, and I for one do not like it one bit.