Hostility Toward Germans Part I: The Anti-German Narrative in the West
Below are excerpts from a very insightful speech which can be found here (in English) and here (in German)
Quote:
Present day historians are generally too sophisticated to draw a clear and direct line between Luther, Frederick, Bismarck and Hitler, but the lingering effects of such propagandistic historiography are still quite noticeable today, expressed in the tendency to treat all German history as the prehistory of the Third Reich.
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One cannot understand this concept of history unless one understands the historical context of the European civil war that has been raging since 1789.
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We are dealing with two utopian and one non-utopian worldviews, Liberalism and Socialism on one hand and what is variously called Conservatism, Reaction or simply the Political Right on the other hand.
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And what does all this have to do with hostility against all things German?
If we conceive of 20th Century wars as parts of a global ideological civil war, Germany obviously represents the Right. Germany could never accept the idea that wars are conducted in order to bring about “The Good Order” such as “War to End All War.”
The idea of “Good War” is part of the Utopian concept of the liberalist world order as pursued by the Western “democracies” as well as the variant of Communism pursued by the Soviet Union.
Nations that were protected by insular geography have historically indulged in bold thinking and thanks to this geography, have been able to pursue global expansionist policies.
The tendency to think in revolutionary and utopian terms was simply alien to Germany -- it was too weak and exposed to attempt changing the world order or to entertain ideas of world conquest.
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In short, the facts that the Germans were different and thought differently from the Anglo Saxons and that they had no sense of Utopia, but rather represented a danger for its global realization, made them the principal enemy figure for Western Utopian thinking.
The cliches about the German national character represent the distorted and demagogically biased description of tendencies and dispositions that actually were (and still are) present. These cliches were indispensible because a country like Germany could not afford globalistic Utopianism.
As we see today, Germany still cannot afford it.
Whether the Anglo Saxon peoples themselves can continue to afford it remains to be seen...
