Your column shows the difference between amateur historians and real historians.
To make your arguments requires many years of study (and thinking).
The huge benefit of the internet is to show glimpses of history that the intellectually curious can follow up on.
Russia cannot escape its character (or history).
I also have my doubts that Germany can escape its character (just watch the operations of a German commercial enterprise; the hierarchical and authoritarian tendencies continue).
My sense is that democracy is a mile wide and an inch deep in Germany.
The former West Germany strikes me today as pretty democratic, if not as liberal or individualistic as America. We have hierarchical tendencies here, without the same history of authoritarianism, of course.
The problems you see with skinheads, revisionism, etc. are almost all rooted in the former East Germany. That formerly communist piece dealt with the Nazi past by not dealing with it. Instead, with respect to the Nazi period, it practiced an enforced amnesia. The problems in Russia stem from similar communist roots and failure of open examination. As a result, Russia has failed the post-Cold War tests of transitioning from autocracy to democracy, empire to nationhood, and economic collectivism to a mainly private economy.
Your column shows the difference between amateur historians and real historians.
To make your arguments requires many years of study (and thinking).
The huge benefit of the internet is to show glimpses of history that the intellectually curious can follow up on.
Russia cannot escape its character (or history).
I also have my doubts that Germany can escape its character (just watch the operations of a German commercial enterprise; the hierarchical and authoritarian tendencies continue).
My sense is that democracy is a mile wide and an inch deep in Germany.
The former West Germany strikes me today as pretty democratic, if not as liberal or individualistic as America. We have hierarchical tendencies here, without the same history of authoritarianism, of course.
The problems you see with skinheads, revisionism, etc. are almost all rooted in the former East Germany. That formerly communist piece dealt with the Nazi past by not dealing with it. Instead, with respect to the Nazi period, it practiced an enforced amnesia. The problems in Russia stem from similar communist roots and failure of open examination. As a result, Russia has failed the post-Cold War tests of transitioning from autocracy to democracy, empire to nationhood, and economic collectivism to a mainly private economy.
I’m writing an article that touches on this subject, so l’ll reserve my comments on your observations—with which I agree up to a point.
History is indeed inescapable. That’s why it so often gets rewritten by people with an ideological agenda.
Regarding Germany, I’d say that it practices a kind of democracy, but not liberal democracy in the classic sense of that term.