Edge of the Financial Cliff
If you have never seen it before, you can today. Adolf Hitler’s style and rhetoric are a topic that should be studied and taught in every school – not so that we might mimic it, of course, but to understand what the difference is between compelling words and truth value, politics and reality. With that, I leave you with one of the greatest sociopaths of all time, who brought much of the Western world to its knees with his dangerous partisanship. Keep in mind, as you watch this, that Hitler may have been the spearhead, but the movement was not possible without seas of supporters willing to do his bidding. These people believed that they were doing the right thing, and that their aim would improve the lot of those around them. The ends were worth any means, and they were working toward some standard of “good” they believed in. If you can grasp that, you will easily see that the difference between our political nature in the U.S. and Germany’s after 1918 is a difference in degree, not kind…
He still looks like the first hipster to me…
hitler wasn’t even that bad at all compared to the US empire. we have killed way more people, invaded way more countries, ruined way more lives….in pretty much every measurable way, hitler’s reign doesn’t even come close to the evil that the united states has perpetuated since WW2.
the ideology of the third reich, and the ideology that its citizens bought into, was to do for germans what was best for germans. they wanted to take back the territory that got stolen from them in WW1, recover the economic reparations that were bled out of them, and kick out all the people in their country that they didn’t want. conversely, the USA’s post-WW2 popular ideology has always been one of expansion and exploitation of others – an outward, conquering empire that must keep devouring its victims in order to maintain its parasitic existence. really big difference here.
these days, comparing the third reich to the USA’s current state is pretty often done, but they really don’t have much in common other than their extremely proficient use of propaganda and the use of this propaganda to gradually erode civil liberties and expand the power of the state. well, and their extremely effective respective models of fascism.
you say that “These people believed that they were doing the right thing, and that their aim would improve the lot of those around them.”. well, the awkward fact is…that they actually did improve their lives in hitler’s germany. that’s how he got so popular! it actually worked! if they wouldn’t have bungled their military adventures, they probably would have coasted and ended up adopting the USA’s post-WW2 setup and “enjoyed the prosperity” that we did. compare all this to the current USA, where instead of a huge socioeconomic boom fueled by fascism, we’re actually just….falling apart, because our fascist-imperialist system ran out of gas. totally different.
the only way for our current situation to end up mirroring that of the third reich is if we had a political leader who seized power by overthrowing the financial elite and instead making deals directly with corporate and military-industrial power (this is what hitler did). now THAT would be terrifying, particularly with today’s technology! whoops, better not give anyone any ideas!
We will have our own Hitler before the country is over…