History Lessons, By Chris Floyd

[The2ndWheel]

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/02/22/120.html

BERLIN, May 12, 2153 -- Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a great battle is now raging. But although the Reich's ancient capital has seen its share of warfare down through the centuries, today's combatants have no swords, no guns, no bio-disrupters -- just words and pictures, marshaled on either side of a fierce debate that has split the academic world in two, and is beginning to spill over into politics. It all revolves around a simple question: Was the German Empire a good thing or a bad thing?

At one time, the answer would have seemed clear. In the three decades since the last "Reich Protectorate" gained its independence (Ukraine, 2122), the liberal consensus among German historians has been that the Empire founded more than 200 years ago by Adolf Hitler was largely a malign development: "a system, born in aggression and atrocity, that inflicted terrible suffering on the conquered lands for generations, and warped German society itself with its arrogance, brutality and corruption," as Germany's leading historian, Yury Vinogradov, put it in his landmark 2128 work, "Reich and Reality." That book set the tone for a flood of hard-hitting probes into Reich history that left almost no nationalist myth intact.

But in recent years, a group of conservative historians dubbed the "Revisionists" has sternly challenged this view. Led by the young Danzig firebrand Gregor Metzger, the Revisionists argue that the achievements of the Empire -- and the "Leader-State system" that was replaced by parliamentary democracy in 2120 -- have been denigrated by, in Metzger's words, "liberal apologists picking at old scabs."

[Clara T]

1. From Article

"The Revisionists say such "scab-picking" is irrelevant in the modern world. "However regrettable, what's done is done," Metzger says. "What matters are the long-term benefits to civilization. One wonders if Herr Professor Vinogradov would enjoy the same kind of prosperity -- and freedom to criticize -- he possesses today if the communist evil had not been destroyed, at great sacrifice, by German power?" "