Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Behind the textbooks

A Youtube historian "TIK" who specializes in WWII got fed up with objections to his claims that National Socialists were socialists, and created a 4-hour explanation, with lots of citations. Luckily he realized that many of us weren't about to sit through it, and he made a transcript.

You may argue that his description lacks nuance: I don't care. I'd heard that historians believed the Nazi economy was collapsing, and needed to loot the rest of Europe to survive. His explanation cites the sources for that claim. I don't think I'll find the time soon to read those books myself (one of them is Hitler's Beneficiaries by Aly), unfortunately.

He gets repetitious when he gets irritable, but for the quotes and the sources, it's worth reading. Or skimming. From Aly's book:

“German soldiers literally emptied the shelves of Europe. They sent millions of packages back home from the front. The recipients were mainly women. When one asks the now elderly witnesses about this period in history, their eyes still gleam at the memory of the shoes from North Africa, the velvet, silk, liqueurs, and coffee from France, the tobacco from Greece, the honey and bacon from Russia, and the tons of herring from Norway - not to mention the various gifts that poured in from Germany’s allies Romania, Hungary, and Italy.”

“Interestingly, while female respondents offered accurate descriptions of the period, the men, without exception, denied ever having sent a single package home.”

6 comments:

  1. One is tempted to ask the critics if they think the U.S. Democrat Party supports 'democracy', why wouldn't a party with 'Socialist' in its name support 'socialism'?

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  2. Christopher B, I think a better example is the US left accepting Antifa as clearly anti-fascist because that's their name. I love a good bit of circular reasoning as much as the next guy, but if we're taking Antifa at their word, why not the Nazis?

    I have actually watched TIK's entire video, though I did it in several sittings. Nice to have the transcript as the length of the video makes it tough to refer back to if I ever wanted to reference or check some aspect of it.

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  3. Transcript tip for such videos:

    On Youtube, there is an icon/button below the video on the right that looks like ellipsis -- three dots . . .

    If you click on that you can choose "Open Transcript" and get a machine-generated transcript in a new pane to the right. It is unpunctuated, so not much good for reading -- but VERY good for text searching.

    So for example, on this video, I can open the transcript, search by using "Control F" for the word 'shoes', and then click on that line of the transcript to be taken immediately to that point in the video (in this case 3:43:26) https://youtu.be/eCkyWBPaTC8?t=13407

    Douglas2

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  4. He made a transcript of his own, listed in the description, which I also linked. I didn't have 4 hours to spare, so I read that instead. And have a few books to look up--when free time permits...

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  5. Thanks, Douglas2. I'm a little chagrined I didn't sort out there's a transcript function on my own.

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