Siemens, Nazi collaborators

From Boing Boing:

At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a slave worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon…

Well, a few years ago, in an act of insensitive fuckery so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name “Zyklon” with the intent of marketing a series of products under the name. Including gas ovens.

David Starkey is poorly educated, says Cabalamat

It seems that royal historian David Starkey is not a big fan of Her Majesty:

Queen is poorly educated and philistine, says Starkey

As the country’s most high-profile historian of the British monarchy, one might expect David Starkey to take a warm view of the house of Windsor.

But in a week in which the Queen overtook Victoria as Britain’s longest-lived monarch, Starkey has delivered a less than rose-tinted verdict on the head of state, accusing her of philistinism and being uninterested in her predecessors, largely due to being poorly educated.

“I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture,” the historian told the Guardian. “You remember: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.’ “

But it wasn’t Goebbels who said that, it was Göring. (The expression originates from Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter in which a character says “Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning” meaning “Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning!”)

Starkey, as a historian, should know better! Particularly when he is criticising someone else’s poor knowledge of history.

Sally Field is sexist and wrong

Norm Geras quotes Sally Field as saying:

If mothers ruled the world, there would be no more god-damned wars.

This is making the claim that if someone is female and has gone through a process roughly equivalent to shitting a melon, one is therefore an inherently virtuous person. This claim is of course sexist and bigotted.

It is also demonstrably untrue: there has been in modern times one polity where men’s and women’s votes were counted separately, so that we know if and how the sexes voted differently. That polity was the Weimar republic in Germany, and during the later Weimar elections that brought Hitler to power, women disproportionately voted fro the Nazis.

There’s nothing wrong in learning from others

Dizzy takes an objection to a letter in the Guardian:

In the Guardian’s Letters page this morning we had this cracker from the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at London Metropolitan University, all about, unsurprisingly, Cuba and that old chestnut healthcare. The letter closes by saying,

“Whatever the deficiencies and criticisms of the Cuban political system may be, we can no longer avoid acknowledging their impressive record in achieving so much [in healthcare] with so little - and possibly learning something in the process.”

He illustrates his annoyance by way of a comparison with Nazi Germany:

Imagine if you will the sort of outrage if someone wrote a letter about the dreadful state of British trains and closed by saying,

“Whatever the deficiencies and criticisms of the Nazi’s political system may be, we can no longer avoid acknowledging their impressive record in achieving so much with their economy and railways - and possibly learning something in the process.”

There’s two objections to this.

Firstly, it’s factually questionable. The Nazi record on railways wasn’t particularly wonderful — the Reichsbahn was starved of investment in the early Nazi years and during the war they had to institute a crash program to build locomotives. Nor did Hitler “make the trains run on time”; that was Mussolini (the trains have always run on time in Germany!). The record of the German wartime economy was not particularly wonderful either — it produced some very good equipment, but was less capable of producing it in the numbers required, and there were in many categories of armaments too many competing programmes when rationalisation would have produced better results.

Secondly, it’s stupid and immoral. The Germans got a lot right in WW2 (they made a lot of mistakes too; they did, after all, lose), so naturally the victorious countries copied lots of things from them — for example in army tactics, jet aircraft, rocketry, nerve gas, assault rifles, and guided weapons. Imagine if a rather po-faced and stupid British leadership had instead said, “the Nazis were evil, so everything about them must be bad, so we won’t try to learn from them”. Then the British armed forces and British industry would have been weaker, and Britain would have gained no corresponding advantage.

All nations will, if they have any sense, look at what other nations are doing and learn from them where they are successful. So one might admire the Finns on their education system; the South Koreans on the speed of their broadband infrastructure; the Chinese for the impressive growth of their economy over the last quarter-century; the Americans for their innovations in computing and the Internet; the South Africans for the peace process that prevented a Yugoslavia-style civil war in their country; the Israelis for their capable and cost-effective armed forces; the Afghans for their dogged determination in kicking out foreign armies; and, yes, the Cubans for their health care system.

Our debt to Russia

The war machine of Nazi Germany was the greatest, most finely crafted, fighting implement the world has ever seen. And what destroyed the German army, the best army in the world, was the Russians. As Ian Shaw put it:

The Russian Army was the largest in the world in World War II. Its training was simple, logistics crude, and medical facilities nearly non-existant. It also defeated the best army in the world, and produced some of the war’s best generals.

The great battles that broke the back of the Wehrmacht — Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk — were fought by the Red Army, and for that the world owes them a debt. As Paul Keating puts it:

The visit to Australia by Vladimir Putin is the first ever by a Russian head of state or head of government.

President Putin, who arrives on Friday, is representing Russia at this week’s APEC leaders’ meeting. Moscow’s membership of APEC is as much an accident as it is a reflection of Russia’s Far East economy.

Russia was offered a place at the APEC table, not because it was a natural constituent, but as a consolation prize by the Americans, for their having taken strategic advantage of it in the years immediately following the Cold War.

No one should ever forget that the Russians carried the primary burden of winning World War II, losing 26 million of their people in the process. More than the present population of Australia. A level of death, destruction and misery on a scale unprecedented in human history.

When Hitler failed to smash Britain with his blitz, he unleashed on Russia the full might of his army and air force, then the largest in history. What followed was carnage and human suffering on an unimaginable scale as the Russian people absorbed his ferocious power. A battering they took for four solid years before a second front was opened in the west at Normandy.

History tells us that the Russian people, with all resolution, summoned all human strength and resources to repel the Nazis, right down through the bloody battles of East Prussia and into Berlin.

Without that Russian sacrifice, Europe could never have been liberated from the west.

While the cause they fought for was evil, the German army of WW2 was probably the best army that’s ever existed — at least in modern times — and I salute them for it. And the Red Army beat them, and I salute them too.

(Link from Normblog)