Quote Originally Posted by Sigaba View Post
With respect, I think you're taking lightly the debate that has caused an extraordinary degree of intellectual, political, and personal conflict among professional academic historians over the past two decades. While some historians are comfortable with a formulation in which the relationship between the 'base' and the 'superstructure' is much more dynamic than initially thought, American social and cultural historians are still slugging it out--to the unending sorrow of those who don't have tenure, to say nothing of a tenure-track job, in the Ivory Tower.
IMO, the historiographical debate is much more nuanced than you present in this summary. Yes, the Nazis viewed the conflict with Bolshevism as existential. However, this mortal struggle contained a racial component that was unrecoverable. Moreover, a number of historians including Peter Fritzsche, Peter Longerich, Wolfram Wette, Alan E. Steinweis, and Stephen G. Fritz (who has sparred with Bartov over an unfavorable review) have provided compelling arguments that rank and file Germans (both civilians and soldiers) had a higher level of 'buy in' to this component of Nazi ideology than previously thought.
The tenure process keeps a lot of debates alive. Publish–or–perish, even if everyone on the tenure committee knows its a make–work publication. (While on an above department level tenure review committee my advisor went to the mat for a guy who had edited a collection of primary documents which no one else on the committee wanted to count toward his publication record. My advisor asked them which would count more in a couple of decades, a couple of deprecated journal articles or easy access to what would have otherwise been practically inaccessible documents? “They never thought of it that way.” Sigh.)

As for ideological buy–in, for me its as much a question of method as anything. I am dubious we can really get into a person’s head when we are sitting in the room with him or her, much less decades on. Others disagree, of course.


Here, you present an interesting linkage between the American soldier (broadly conceived) and his/her former life as a civilian. If your interpretation is correct, what does it say of the efficacy of the training and indoctrination of American servicemen? Are they provided the technical expertise to kill while relying more on their social and cultural upbringing rather than the ethos of professional soldiers? If such is the case, can the "warrior spirit" be learned (much less taught)? Or, as many of the QPs at PS.COM aver, are warriors born and not made--and thus individual differences trump social and cultural backgrounds?
That wasn’t really my intent. I was implying that Westerners often like to pat themselves on the back about their relative degree of civilization (civilizedness?) and suggest that they really shouldn’t.