Thread by @HNIJohnMiller

1) Late night musings here.

The Weimar Republic in Germany. It’s fall. Who it fell to.

The order of occurences in which it fell.

You know, that kind of thing.

2) The first thing to note; the applicability of ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ was ONLY done by ‘scholars’ such as the fraudsters of the Frankfurt School well after World War 2. The labels only make sense if you assume that there were cleanly drawn lines between disparate groups.

3) Throw out that assumption.

What you had were two umbrellas of groups.

The first were those who were trying to preserve Germany and the Weimar Republic, which was the equivalent of trying to fix a dam with duct tape.

4) The second group, and I use that term in the loosest sense possible, were the communists, anarchists, and socialists of every shade of asshole that were trying to bring the system down and seize power, fighting each other in the streets.

5) You’ve seen ‘antifa’ as a group that existed standing against the Nazis, of course, those old photos.

Funny story: that was only late in the game that they came together under that banner. They spent close to a decade fighting each other before then.

6) I spoke of the Bavarian Soviet Republic before, and I’ll just speed through the summary before hitting the points I glossed over previously.

7) First, socialists who were not Bavarian or competent seized power and dethroned the Bavarian royalty, and then realized they couldn’t run a functional government.

Then their leader was assassinated.

Then the communists and the socialists split and started shooting eachother

8) Then the socialists got a ‘free company’ of former soldiers turned mercenaries that would eventually become the paramilitary wing of the Nazis to come in, shoot more communists, and kill a lot of people after the commies lost their shit and executed all their rich hostages.

9) Now, an interesting thought occurs. Where was the Weimar Republic in all this?

They weren’t there. They weren’t allowed to have a military to deal with these problems, so the laid off soldiers turned to the groups who could pay them to shoot people, the anti-government groups

10) This is where I get a bit deep.

Hundreds, by some counts thousands were killed in these and other clashes. Armies of thousands were involved in Bavaria alone.

Why isn’t it called a civil war? You had literal roaming armies of ex-soldiers shooting people.

11) That’s because if you call it a civil war, the people writing history books have to acknowledge how fucking chaotic it was.

And if they acknowledge that, then they have to acknowledge this next piece of the puzzle.

12) At the local level, city by city, socialists started winning elections. No, not Nazis, they were still gearing up and just entering the national stage, after their attempted revolt got a lot of them thrown in jail and later released.

13) It was in the meantime that socialists promising pie in the sky dreams against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

See, that’s the other thing to note: the Weimar Republic’s economy had actually started to recover, barring high unemployment as industries were rebuilt.

14) The Weimar Republic cut deals to neuter the socialists’ standing and support, by taking large New York loans. Then the Great Depression shattered the recovery, and then the socialists who had been unable to make much headway in politics started to win government positions.

15) See, some of the socialists in the national government were browbeaten into agreeing to the loans, even as the other socialists stood against the loans. By agreeing to them, the socialist parties fractured and shrank drastically.

16) These socialists, keep in mind, were not the Nazis. They hadn’t reentered the scene yet. But these socialists would play an important role in the Nazi rise to power.

If it weren’t for the Great Depression, these groups would have been permanently emmasculated and irrelevant.

17) With the Great Depression, socialist support at the local level skyrocketed, and many cities were socialist governments, including Bavaria which was STILL run by the socialists there.

To counter this, the communists and anarchists coalesced into antifa.

18) The violence of the early-mid 1920’s kicked off again, this time with an attempt by the commies to seize an entire city which fell apart in a few days tops, those same free companies from the Bavarian incident chasing them off.

19) So tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

The antifa goons would go into a city, riot, and tear down statues, monuments, w/e.

The local socialist-run governments would pull all the law enforcement out of the riot zones and let antifa run wild.

20) Then the Nazis and their free company paramilitary would swoop in, restore order.

Rinse repeat.

21) Leaving it off there for tonight. I’ll continue tomorrow tying it into nowadays.