• DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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    2 months ago

    Kaiser Wilhelm was:

    Expansionist and irredentist

    Fervently anti-democracy

    Rabidly anti-semitic

    Trying to secure overseas colonies to exploit for resources

    The Third Reich was the Second Reich without a noble class to fuck things up with inbreeding. It’s hardly surprising, a culture can’t change completely in the span of a couple decades.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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        2 months ago

        You’ll find that Britain and France, while imperialist colonizers, were mostly concerned with holding on to their territory and as solidly liberal and as pro-democracy as 2/3 of the founding nations of liberalism can be. One of Wilhelm’s explicit goals was dismantling the very idea of voting in Europe and returning the continent to absolute rule of the aristocracy.

        Anti-semitism was ever present but it was only in Germany that the head of state has his hopes of justifying a pogram broken by the fact his pet scapegoats were provably volunteering for service at a higher rate than Gentiles. Though you must give Wilhelm that much, he was sane enough to listen when people showed him proof, some of the time.

        • cyd@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          “While imperialist colonizers” is doing a lot of work in the post. In my view, there’s little credit to be given out for offering liberalism to a tiny fraction of the population under your rule. So from a macro standpoint, Wilhelm hardly stands out.

          I will give the British some credit for bowing to the inevitability of decolonization many years later, after WWII, with only a little bit kicking and screaming. (France, not so much.)

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            2 months ago

            Sure, people who criticize liberalism (leftists) tend to point out that liberals have a very, very specific definition of “human” when it comes to their track record of human rights, especially before WW2, and if you held the historical liberal nations to account of that fact liberalism has only actually existed fairly recently.

            With that in mind, they get credit for the reality of liberalism as it has been practiced for most of its history. Mostly applied to property owning white men.

            And obviously many of those issues were eventually addressed, at least in part. That progress is something that was directly against the ideology of the Second Reich, and no amount of hypocrisy from historical liberalism will change that.

        • roboto@feddit.org
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          2 months ago

          Man how revisionist can you be? For a poor fucker in Algeria, India or Namibia it really didn’t matter who committed genocide and if they were liberal or supporting democracy back home. Sure that Prussian king was a particularly unpleasant fella, but they all committed genocide and all others sorts of atrocities in their colonies and I really don’t think it’s appropriate to downplay just how bad the British & French were and actually all other European colonizers for that matter.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            2 months ago

            Not my fault you think liberals are the good guys instead of the not-as-bad guys.

            Not my fault you don’t know what revisionism is either.

            Also not my fault you don’t know Wilhelm was planning on genociding his current and future African territories to make room for German settlers.

            https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-germanys-extermination-program-for-black-africans-a-template-for-the-holocaust/

            Feel free to check their sources if you don’t like the site.

            • roboto@feddit.org
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              2 months ago

              Is this a case study on how many logical fallacies you can fit into a certain amount of characters? I will only address the part that I was actually talking about and not all the other irrelevant stuff:

              First of all, of course I won’t read a Times of Israel article. But you using that as a source also makes sense. That being said, the Germans weren’t just planning, they committed the first genocide of the 20th century, hence my mentioning of Namibia.

              Again, that doesn’t change that the British were committing genocide e.g. in India, and let’s not forget all the indigenous victims of settler colonialism. The German genocide also doesn’t change the genocide that the French committed against Algerians or the Belgiums in Congo, it’s a long list. They were all bad and trying to justify that is just bad faith.

              And now I’m done here, wtf are you even doing rambling about Kaiser Wilhelm in a post about our local elections lol.