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The purge of German science in 1933

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Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#71

Post by binary132 »

Terr_ wrote: post #7
atleastoptimal wrote: post #4

I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.

If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#72

Post by Civitello »

cedilla wrote: post #59
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.

heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#73

Post by seabass-labrax »

devjab wrote: post #57
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever…

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.

I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology.

However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#74

Post by reissbaker »

arp242 wrote: post #54
bsder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an England which basically had no Jews. Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290. Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction of the king. c. 1066 I can go further and further back ... Anti-semitism is old .

Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does. None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.

I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.

I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#75

Post by reissbaker »

paganel wrote: post #36
greedo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.

Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed. Yes, I do know about the very unf…

Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

And where do you think the Jews in the 1800s in Europe came from? Of course, they'd been there all along, except in the countries that actively ethnically cleansed them like Spain.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#76

Post by tptacek »

arp242 wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.

I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view. This is not "weird thing", it's a mainstream view that I got from mainstream Jewish authors on the history of Jews. But hey, maybe those are…

So, I didn’t read you that way, and, fair enough. But that’s still not true. Antisemitism was racialized in Spain, too, and I think you can find sources for earlier strains. And all “scientific racism” will of course stem from the 1800s, along with science itself.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#77

Post by graycat »

Common estimates are that WWII killed 50 million to 100 million people. So, wanted to get some understanding of how it happened, how to avoid such, and looked at many descriptions of that history.

I'm just a US citizen, not a professional historian, and here have only rough explanations, maybe not 100% wrong.

A really short description: Hitler became a dictator and then went nuts.

For a little more:

(1) Foundation. The German culture didn't have much in resistance, walls, defenses, etc. against a dictatorship. Hopefully our US Constitution and three branches of government will have the US do better.

(2) Provocation. Germany suffered in WWI, the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, some massive monetary inflation, and, then, the Great Depression.

(3) Unification. Early on, say, starting near 1933, Hitler was an effective speaker and able to exploit the culture and the provication politically to unify Germany.

(4) Success. Soon Hitler was a dictator and had something of a 4 year plan to get the economy going again. In simple terms, the plan worked.

Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.

(5) Empire. Long in Europe, the idea of an empire was common, and Hitler wanted one and started grabbing land.

There was the reaction of the conference and treaty at Munich, 9/30/1938.

Hitler could'a stopped there, but, nope, he was only beginning. He had an excuse he could use -- his master race wanted living space.

(6) Poland. He attacked Poland and quickly occupied about half of it. An excuse was that he wanted the piece of Poland that separated Germany and East Prussia. France and England responded with war on Germany, but it didn't do much. Hitler could'a stopped there.

By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.

(7) Military. Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously.

For longer, larger battles, his military was not good: His airplanes didn't have enough range to do well bombing England. England's defense -- radar, Spitfires -- was good; Hitler's losses were high; and he gave up.

He could'a stopped there.

Instead, he attacked Russia; his front and supply lines were both too long; and Russia was too much for his "fast attack military".

(8) Two Fronts. While Hitler was losing in Russia, the US and England did the D-Day attack at Normandy and quickly ran to Germany. He was in a "two front" war with both fronts long lasting and too much for his "fast attack military".

(9) Nuts. He had lots of chances to stop in place, declare victory, sign some papers, and live in peace. Instead, as his attack on Russia was failing he went nuts and went even more nuts after D-Day.

Lesson: Too commonly, if make a human a dictator, they will be short on constraints and do nutty things, e.g., want to take over the world. So, have a constitution and a democracy that keeps out dictators.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#79

Post by EnigmaFlare »

dmbche wrote: post #32
wongarsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.

You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.

You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones.

There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data.

I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority.

This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#80

Post by EnigmaFlare »

wongarsu wrote: post #28
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.

There's a dirty fashion in climate science to include political activism or call to action in their papers. Especially if they've found something that shows good news about climate change. They qualify it with "... but we must all make an effort to reduce fossil fuel use".

I used to teach science and would tell students not to give life advice to the reader, because that's what we were supposed to teach them. But then all these climate change papers started doing just that. It's equivalent of ancient mathematicians saying "glory to the king" in their work and reveals that the authors are bound by a conflict of interest and can't be expected to do honest work.

I recently read one about childhood safety, and they said that following the government's safety rules was important, while also defining their own idea of what kinds of safety are valuable or harmful. If the government already knows better than you, why are you even researching this? It's obviously just some effort to pressure people into not making their own dangerous decisions. But again, that's not science, that's activism and non-objective.

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