The 88-year-old professor and infamous Jewish author Noam Chomsky has just recently asserted that the Weimar era in Germany may have been the peak of Western civilization
https://psmag.com/noam-chomsky-talks-tr ... .vm6x1tsi5
There are plenty of examples in history of post-truth, post-fact worlds, and some of them are not very attractive. For example, take perhaps the utter depths of human history, the Nazi regime, which was implanted and we should remember, the leading outpost of Western civilization. The peak of Western civilization in many ways was Germany in the 1920s in the arts, the sciences, and even as a model for democracy. Within 10 years, it had descended to the depths of barbarism in a post-fact society. The propaganda was extremely effective in creating a world of illusion in which the Aryan race was under attack by Jews and Bolsheviks, and only Nazi Germany could protect the white Aryan race from destruction......
I could afford some more in-depth knowledge of the precise environment in pre-WWII Germany so I'm hoping for some quality feedback here. Thoughts?
That statement is indeed more then grotesque given the historical facts of the Weimar era. It's asserted that the Weimar Republic would be the "peak of civilization" in terms of:
- model democracy.
One can only wonder what he's referring to. The Art was mostly ugly and promoted by rather dubious figures.
What sciences was he referring to? Sure Germany still had a legacy of sciences, but what achievements in the Weimar era is he referring to?
The "Weimar democracy" was unstable right from the beginning. It started with a dubious revolution. Had several coup attempts. Went through hyperinflations and economic crisis, impoverished broad classes of people, jailed and repressed opponents and had several corruption scandal (which appear harmless with what you get nowadays though).
Jews played a prominent role in the Weimar Republic and in the public perception generally not a good one. Some of them enriched themselves at the expense of hard-working German people. That was the reason they were commonly disliked by the Germans. This by far wasn't limited to the NSDAP and its following. In fact there may have been no difference in regards how the supporters of different parties viewed them. The difference was rather how they viewed parliamentary democracy, which was highly influenced by people's relationships to trade unions and churches.
Anger, disappointment, frustration were widespread in the Germany of the Weimar era. And that for good reasons. The outcome was that only a minority of voter supported the system with National Socialists, Monarchists and Communists having a solid majority in parliamentary seats. The voters of the social democratic, liberal and clerical parties weren't really enthusiastic to defend Weimar as that administration didn't have anything worth showing. The apathy is probably the reason why they voted in support of Hitler empowerment act and that there wasn't really much resistance to the NS-take-over.
There were huge budget cuts on academia in 1932 just before Hitler became Chancellor. And that's actually the reason many academics left Germany in 1933 after they got bursaries and offers of positions elsewhere.