Professor, the comment to which I object is:
“Because the one thing the Nazis definitely were not were global players.”
I gather — like Rahul before me — that beneath your snark was an assertion that the ambitions of a modern multinational are not utterly irreconcilable from those of the National Socialists. You subsequently confirmed my suspicion:
“[I] was struck by the fatuity of this Bertelsmann defender’s response, in which he says that our values today are irreconcilable with the Nazis, and the reason we know this is that we are global players in today’s media. As if being a global player was irreconcilable with supporting Nazi values.”
My objection has nothing to do with your assessment of either Bertelsmann’s history or its contemporary operations (upon which I am not qualified to comment). Nor, I wish to stress, do I have any particular problem with the idea using the Third Reich as a point of comparison within a contemporary context. That being said, if one is to make such a fraught comparison, it is incumbent upon them to do so upon a solid historical foundation.
In this regard, I do not expect you to have an intimate familiarity with Gottfried Feder’s ponderous reflections upon the evils of “interest slavery” or to be able to quote Hitler’s memorandum on the Four-Year Plan from memory. In fact, even though you’re a Yale man, I would not be chagrined to learn that you had never read Henry Turner Ashby’s work on big business and the rise of Nazis.
What I do expect, however, is that you display the requisite historical sensibility to grasp that the Nazis explicitly and consistently rejected the idea that Germany should ever again participate within the wider global economy. Hitler and his coterie expressed their disgust at what they perceived as an Anglo-American-dominated liberal international political economy on numerous occasions and sought to construct a hermetically sealed and self-supporting sphere of influence that would obviate the need for further engagement with the global economy (which they asserted — and not entirely without justification — had contributed to Germany’s impoverishment). In those instances where they did consent to transnational corporate collaboration (most notably in the case of the cartel agreements between IG Farben and Standard Oil), their assent was always grudging and guided by expediency — specifically, the hope that such partnerships were temporary and would ultimately further their ambitions to remove Germany from the prevailing international economic order. For this reason, any German firm that chose to privilege its transnational interests over those of the Volk was, by definition, not “supporting Nazi values.”
It is for this reason that I took offense to your apparently off-hand remark — not because I thought it was in bad taste, but rather because it was bad History (or history, if you prefer) and — if you will forgive my presumptuousness — reflected poorly on your standing as a scholar.
Sincerely,
etc.
P.S. You’re reading far too much into the fact that capitalize nouns when referring to academic disciplines.