Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

I see the Holocaust, aside form the terrible crime that it was in itself, as a sign that democracy can sometimes fail. Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square. His message was one of hate, but it resonated with the majority of his countrymen at the time. And then, at all times until it was too late, he was supported by a majority of them again.

What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances. It's a system with lots of safeguards so that hate does not get legalized, but it was not always like that. It got like that after a half million men lost their life in the struggle to tell right from wrong in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Other countries fought equally bloody battles to figure out their own system of checks and balances. Britain went through its own horrendous civil wars, France went from revolution to revolution from 1789 to pretty much de Gaulle's coup in 1958.

Most countries in the world did not go through such a process though. In all these countries, if democracy exists, it is either a charade, or an immature democracy like the one that allowed the rise of Hitler. No wonder that people like Putin can get in power through the process of democratic elections.

I think the democratic aspect can be overemphasised. The Weimar Republic lasted only 15 years and lurched from crisis to crisis. It was rife with political violence, several attempted uprisings, military with questionable loyalty to this new government, economy in taters, so politically unstable that rule by decree had effectively become the norm.

Democracy didn't prevent his rise, but democracy was barely existent.

> Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square.

Debatable. In Weimar Germany’s last free and fair election, the NSDAP won the most seats, but failed to win a majority. von Papen, who was leader of the Centre Party (a centre-right Catholic party), convinced President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Neither von Papen nor von Hindenburg were Nazis; they thought they could control Hitler, they found out too late that rather than controlling Hitler, Hitler was controlling them. President von Hindenburg died in office of old age, at which point Hitler decided Germany didn’t need a President any more to keep the Chancellor in check. After the Nazis banned his own Centre Party, von Papen accepted the inevitable, joined the Nazi Party and spent the war as German ambassador to Turkey. At no point did the majority of Germans vote for Hitler in a free and fair election.

> What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances.

Weimar Germany had checks and balances too, it is just they didn't work. There is no guarantee that America's will forever continue to work either.

And America is a democracy. Some people want to define "democracy" in a very narrow sense to exclude any checks and balances, but that's not usual contemporary English usage. It is the same as these people who pedantically insist that "America is a republic not a democracy", ignoring that in saying that they are using the word "democracy" in a narrower sense than normal. In the normal sense of "democracy", it includes systems which aren't pure democracies, that moderate democracy with checks and balances such as judicial review, representative rather direct democracy, etc – which are very common worldwide, far from being unique to the US

> Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square.

Sort of but this misses some crucial detail. He lost his run at the presidency to Paul vin Hindenberg. Under Germany’s system, the leader of the largest party became chancellor, which he eventually did.

He didn’t secure a majority of votes though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_pow...

Edit: Skissane beat me to it and makes the point better.

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