Thank you so much—nuance really is everything, especially when history gets flattened into black-and-white narratives. I’m really grateful you saw that in the piece. We need more conversations that live in the gray.
TheMadPhilosopher
joined 6 days ago
While researching this, what genuinely wrecked me was realizing that there wasn’t just one drug crisis in Germany—there were two. An opiate crisis after WWI and a meth crisis after WWII. Layered over that is the unimaginable scale of the Holocaust, the physical and moral scorched earth that followed, and the complete collapse of a population that had already lost so much.
I always knew the Nazis were monsters—but I didn’t fully grasp how many people inside Germany were also victims: people who resisted, who stayed because they believed they could fight from within, who were swallowed by a system they refused to join. It just… broke something open in me.
Have you ever come across something in history that made you stop and rethink everything—not just who the villains were, but what it meant to survive them?
While researching this, what genuinely wrecked me was realizing that there wasn’t just one drug crisis in Germany—there were two. An opiate crisis after WWI and a meth crisis after WWII. Layered over that is the unimaginable scale of the Holocaust, the physical and moral scorched earth that followed, and the complete collapse of a population that had already lost so much.
I always knew the Nazis were monsters—but I didn’t fully grasp how many people inside Germany were also victims: people who resisted, who stayed because they believed they could fight from within, who were swallowed by a system they refused to join. It just… broke something open in me.
Have you ever come across something in history that made you stop and rethink everything—not just who the villains were, but what it meant to survive them?
While researching this, what genuinely wrecked me was realizing that there wasn’t just one drug crisis in Germany—there were two. An opiate crisis after WWI and a meth crisis after WWII. Layered over that is the unimaginable scale of the Holocaust, the physical and moral scorched earth that followed, and the complete collapse of a population that had already lost so much.
I always knew the Nazis were monsters—but I didn’t fully grasp how many people inside Germany were also victims: people who resisted, who stayed because they believed they could fight from within, who were swallowed by a system they refused to join. It just… broke something open in me.
Have you ever come across something in history that made you stop and rethink everything—not just who the villains were, but what it meant to survive them?
I think what gets missed here is that in the context of revolution, executing the monarch isn’t shocking—it’s standard. Historically, revolutionaries don’t leave kings alive. So whether Moscow directly ordered it or not almost doesn’t matter—it was a move to secure the revolution, and everyone complicit probably knew it had to happen.
What bothers me more is how much the narrative around this moment was shaped by the Cold War and the Red Scare. Lenin gets turned into this cartoon villain in Western historiography, like this was a uniquely cruel act, when in reality? Monarchs fall in revolutions. That’s not a Lenin thing—it’s a history thing.
I just think we’ve been fed a really distorted lens for so long that people forget how common this is in global uprisings. It’s not a morality play—it’s a power shift.
Stuff like this is what I get stuck in for days—I’m deep into exploring how narratives get shaped after the fact. Especially how power rewrites history to serve itself.