• mkwt@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I can’t get over how stupid this headline is.

    In nazi parlance, the first Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second Reich was the unified German empire that ended with WWI. The third Reich was the German state and government created by Adolf Hitler. The Weimar Republic, at least according to Nazis, was not strong enough to count as a reich.

    The point I’m getting to is that real Nazis are so German nationalist, they wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “Reich” for anything that’s not German.

    That’s how fascists are. They’re incredibly nationalistic.

    Meanwhile, the United States has enjoyed the same constitutional government since 1789. You can’t call a hypothetical successor state the fourth anything. In my thinking, it should be the second whatever. You could maybe stretch it to “third” by counting the Articles of Confederation government as the first. But if Weimar doesn’t count I don’t see why the Articles government should count.

    Edit:

    If anything should be called the Fourth Reich, it’s the current government of Germany (from 1945). Germany enjoys massive political power both on its own and through the European Union. It has unified the ethnic Germans of Poland, Austria, and Czechia by means of Schengen. Modern Germany is even sending tanks back east to Ukraine.