The far-right AfD party won the state elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia with 30.5% of the vote on Sunday (1 September), according to exit polls, marking the party's first win in a state election.
“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.)
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.
“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.)
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.