I'm with you man, I'm tired of the same old blame germany thingie. Everybody says germany was militaristic because they were germans but it was rather that they were a european nation like any other. Prussia's legacy was not only military tradition but also great sciences and school systems.
thank you for taking the time to argue here and i will be trying to check out your sources soon I hope
I never said they were militaristic because they were Germans. I said Prussia was militaristic because this is how it went from poor elector-state to Great Power and founder of Germany. Unfortunately for the other states in the Empire, it was Prussia that led the state, not them. Russia also has great science and school systems, but nobody rates Russia for Mendeleev or launching the first satellite so I don't see what that part of Prussia's history does to invalidate the tradition dating to Frederick the Great and his father.
She makes no arguments beyond the school of half-truths and distortions of events. Claiming for instance that the failure of Hindenburg and Ludendorff's economic plans means they weren't dictators would lead to the conclusion that the failure of the Virgin Lands Project means Nikita Khrushchev wasn't a dictator either. Similarly use of tu quoque to claim that because the Allies blatantly violated Greek neutrality the Germans never did that with Belgium is well, a logical fallacy.
Similarly also noting that the stereotype of the monolithic German officer corps is not true is a worthy thing to note but it's irrelevant given that Schlieffen's plan did involve invading both Belgium and the Netherlands, so Moltke's plan was less arrogant and dickish than the original version.
Also, statements like "I'm not convinced this is true" mean nothing about whether or not the statement is or is not true. So if this is what people consider good argument, more power to you, here's a nice list of logical fallacies you and the other commenter in this post should know:
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/
I am a bit blunt when it comes to posting, this does not mean I condemn anything in the post unless I explicitly note that, and I reserve condemnation for individuals more than societies and political movements when it comes to societies as opposed to the entire society.
Honestly, and I reasonably think I speak for most of us, but her arguments are much more convincing than your boring, repetitive polemics.
All you've engaged in is a game of "Your objections to my objections to your historiography are wrong because I said so here."
In fact, I'm so intrigued I'm tempted to find all of the sources she brought up and read them myself.
Polemics? I've brought up historical reality, she engages in a bunch of histronics about how my arguments are mean and out of date while never summarizing her own arguments beyond "there are books that prove me right." That's not enough for 67th Tigers and it's not enough for her, either, given the metholodogy used is the exact same thing, claiming the exact opposite of what really happened and using books to justify the claims made.
My arguments are not polemics, nor are they really condemnations of Germany. I see it as more of a Greek Tragedy than anything malicious on the part of German leaders, and in any event neither she nor you use facts to refute the argument, only claiming "but random books and authors say so."
I said that the elector-state of Brandenburg rose from its focus on military power at the expense of all else, because it did. I said that it unified Germany under military rule, because it did. I said that this history would incline German rulers more to war than other European rulers because every time they resorted to war it had worked out well for them. Where is the polemics here, where is the condemnation? I suppose for not crediting the German military as all-knowing supermen and the Germans as Marty Tzus and instead giving German rulers and people respect as human beings with human motivation that is indeed polemics.
If that be so, and if using historical events and arguments instead of half-truths and selective focus on parts of events at the expense of the whole is indeed accurate, then so be it. I'm not the one that argued the failure of the Hindenburg Plan means they weren't dictators, as most dictatorships aren't successful but this makes them no less dictatorships.
Similarly, she says she's not convinced this is so and uses a lot of statements to that effect such as this:
Arguments that Prussia was somehow already militaristic enough to not require such a coup or indeed, such massacres, seem silly to me. Sure, you do have a social ladder on which officers rank pretty high; sure, you do have a society in which somebody pretending to be an army officer can commandeer a bank and ransack it with nobody the wiser; sure, you do have the leaders of that state sometimes ostentatiously making comparisons to violent barbarians of the past. But you also have a state that, contrary to the wishes of the military, did not engage in preventive wars after its formation; a state that promoted universal manhood suffrage against the prevailing opinion of many of the Junkers of the army; a state that established an expensive social insurance program drawing in significant part on the wealth of the landed aristocracy that is supposedly synonymous with the army leadership in general. You have conscious attempts to foster navalism, to the point where the naval budget dwarfed the army budget (and in a state which lacked direct taxation expedients, budgeting was a zero-sum game) - and navalism, especially the sort espoused by the ultimate cold-warrior Tirpitz, had open warfare as its antithesis.
It suffices to say that I do not believe that "militarism" can be so easily pigeonholed, and that Prussia-Germany did not possess the sort of stereotypical "militarism" as is often attributed to it in any greater amounts than did the United Kingdom, France, Russia, or Japan.
Do nothing to invalidate the statements beyond saying she does not believe them. There are a lot of things one can be free to disbelieve that are all the same true. And in this case there needs to be more, much more, to indicate that the Germans being far more overt about the nature of power rising out of the barrel of a gun never really happened and all this was just lies by the Germans' enemies to discredit them than simply saying one doesn't believe it. If one is going to call Kaiser Wilhelm II and his generals or Adolf Hitler liars, one needs much more than refusal to believe in a specific statement to make it so.
Otto von Bismarck was a conservative, he united Germany by war and did seek to avoid it because he understood how dangerous a big war actually was. This applied to almost none of his successors and there is no co-incidence in Germany's militarism getting far stronger after he was booted out, such as deliberately triggering no less than two pre-war crises and encouraging Austria-Hungary to go to war with Serbia as in the words of one of the German leaders of 1914 "it is better now than in a few years when the Entente will be stronger."
To put it another way, they made the Austro-Hungarians back down multiple times before 1914 and then gave them a blank check in 1914. If they weren't actively wanting war they were too stupid to be in charge of anything but dog-walking.