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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

> There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense.

Hitler was only in power for a decade or so and did a lot of damage to say the least.

wades in When Hitler battled to power the Weimar Republic was experiencing hyperinflation and the economy had just shut down. I don't think Hitler's ideology was the biggest problem the Germans were facing. As the communist regimes like China and the Soviets demonstrated again after the war, a mismanaged economy is literally worse than Hitler for the people involved.

So I'll admit the situation is too complicated for me to really say this honestly, but the real issue the Germans faced was that they had lost WWI and a bunch of foreign powers were extracting large amounts of wealth from them. They eventually snapped and responded with violence. The fact that the focus when they snapped was Nazi ideology was unfortunate, but the problem wasn't the ideology - it was that foreigners were taking their wealth and the government failed to keep people fed, sheltered and employed.

> the real issue the Germans faced was that they had lost WWI and a bunch of foreign powers were extracting large amounts of wealth ... the problem wasn't the ideology - it was that foreigners were taking their wealth and the government failed to keep people fed, sheltered and employed.

This is pretty blatant Nazi apologist rhetoric. Many groups have been wronged by foreign and domestic powers for decades, and they did not all respond with large-scale mechanized genocide. The buildup and virulent spread of focused hate in Nazi Germany was unique and can't be explained by a simple external geo-political power struggle.

No, that was pretty blatant Keynesianism [0]. Although I suppose if it is possible to be a Nazi apologist in 1919 then maybe I can be one too.

I did admit it was complicated. But the state of the economy was clearly a contributer to the rise of the Nazi party. It isn't like Hitler got in because the Germans just went crazy one day and thought the dude was a great guy to lead. He got in because the country was collapsing anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_t...

The Roman empire collapsed, the Soviet union collapsed, numerous South American, Eastern European countries collapsed, the US economy crashed in the great depression. None of them resulted in anything remotely resembling Hitler's Germany. Hate is an emotion. It can be stoked by class resentment and injustice, but it's quite a different thing. Hitler harnessed hate like few societies have seen before or since.

Did any of those have some other country sitting just outside of their borders demanding that they hand over more wealth while they starved? Unlike most other countries in collapse, Germany had a nearby enemy that really was the active, willful cause of their suffering.

Yes, Germans at that time had a very good reason to hate the French and English.

Which doesn't explain the Nazis' profound hatred of Jews, gays, and the disabled.

The roman empire collapsed "outwards" for centurys, hunting slaves, and rampaging through whole medieval countrysides, before collapsing inwards.

The Stalin's Soviet Union, after the collapse of Russian Empire, did resemble the Hitler's Germany (or vice versa) and not too remotely.

I love how in modern discourse, nazi apologists predate nazis.

Something bad, probably a big war, was indeed inevitable, but if someone with less hatred of Jews had stood up, at least we'd have avoided a disastrous genocide.

Um, public antisemitism was pretty common everywhere in the west pre WW 2. It became a socially unacceptable position in polite circles only after the Nazi genocide.

Racism was a mainstream position back then. For example, US black population got full rights only in the 60's.

The horror of nazis was not that they were some deranged mob of gangsters that only german subconscious could put up with. The horror of nazis was that they could have happened anywhere. They are a historys dark mirror showing to all societies a very bad example of what could be.

Oh, absolutely, I know antisemitism was very mainstream back then, and it could have happened elsewhere. But far from all leaders were willing to go as far as leading a nation into full-on genocide. The fact that it was someone like Hitler who rose up is a fluke of history, although one could argue that something like it would have happened sometime anyway, maybe a couple decades later; that's hard to speculate about.

Sadly lot of leaders have led their nation to genocide and suppresion of minority cultures. Hitler was not unique even in that aspect. US had a pretty genocidal tendency towards native americans, for example.

What was unique in Nazi germany was the industrialized efficiency with which the horror of genocide was implemented. IBM:s machines played a no small part in that.

The nation of Goethe and Beethoven plunged into a total inhuman batshit insanity. Another horrible aspect of this was the ease people could go on with it - "just doing my duty and following orders". Some people did the final horror of killing, but the precursor to that was the industrial labour and logistical planning of getting the people to the slaughterhouse. The system that funneled people to their doom was absolutely chilling in it's efficiency. And it could have happened everywhere as well.

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