Many of the oldest memes are still the truest, like “And then one day, for no reason at all, people voted Hitler into power” or in the original German….
The point of the meme is powerful one, and it is applicable again today with the current state of affairs.
People in America just can’t understand why the German people would elect Adolf Hitler to lead Deutschland. He is the embodiment of all that is bad so therefore the German people must have been evil. There is no other explanation for the rise of Moustache Man Bad.
What is missing is historical context.
Thanks to the endless propagandizing of the Second World War by The Usual Suspects in Hollywood most people can’t explain anything about World War II other than Moustache Mad Bad killed 6 million Jews. Maybe an older person can still speak about Pearl Harbor and Normandy Beach but the context around World War II is well outside of the understanding of most people.
I assume most of us here understand the situation in Germany pre-Moustache Man Bad. Interwar Germany was in the depths of an economic crisis during what is known as the Weimar Republic, a period that has become synonymous with economic catastrophe and hyperinflation. The pictures from that era show people using wheelbarrows of Marks to buy a loaf of bread, using stacks of cash to heat their home or wallpapering rooms. By 1933 things were so bad that the German people were desperate for something, anything to alleviate their suffering and reverse their humiliation imposed on them after the end of World War I. That something, anything? Moustache Man Bad and the Third Reich.
As an amateur observer of the human condition, I have assembled a modest list of truths that I keep on hand. This is one of Arthur’s truths to live by:
People are incredibly predictable. Until they aren’t.
Show me a regular person under regular circumstances, give me a little info about them and a hypothetical situation and I can probably tell you how they will react. Take that same person and put them significant stress? Suddenly I don’t know what they will do because people under duress can do stuff you never thought they would do.
As someone who knows a little more than the average Joe about Germany under the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, more commonly known as the Nazi Party, I like to think I can view what was going on with a little more nuance than simply “Moustache Man Bad!”. German National Socialism was a pretty radical new approach in response to the early stages of the liberal democratic capitalistic system on the one hand, and the looming threat of Bolshevism and Marxism rising from the East in the Soviet Union. Much of their 25 point National Socialist Program, which virtually no one who calls people Nazis online and brags about being “anti-Fascist” has actually read, has to do with racial solidarity but it also includes stuff like:
All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
It is safe to say a lot of “anti-Fascists”, if presented with ideas like that, would enthusiastically support them as long as you don’t tell them they originated with Adolf Hitler. Most of the 25 points are direct responses to the perceived abuse and excess of the elites in Germany at the expense of the German people. The German people, again desperate for someone to lead them out of their misery, responded to this in 1933 by voting for the NSDAP by a more than 2-1 margin over the next closest platform. The rest, as they say, is history.
Desperate people will turn to desperate measures.
The lessons for today should be apparent.
Germany didn’t elect Hitler and the NSDAP because they all just hated Jews and voted for the guy who also hated Jews. The German people elected Hitler because they had been pushed into a corner and they responded the only way they thought they could, by voting for someone who declared he had the interests of regular Germans first and foremost.
In the current day we have something similar going on. The actual American people are being squeezed and replaced while simultaneously being vilified for being awful people for noticing that we are getting shit on. Elections are stolen, we are being silenced and all the while the burden of keeping the lights on falls more heavily on us even as we grow fewer in number.
This should not be read as a defense of National Socialism or an excuse for German atrocities in the prior century. It should be read as a warning to those who seek to crush us under their heel that when backed into a corner and left with no other choice, people will often lash out in self-defense and that can manifest in very unpredictable ways.
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. We might be seeing a repeat in the near future as the same errors of judgement are being played out right in front of us.
A very thought-provoking piece; well done. I'm still inclined toward accelerationism. But people like me would be (and are) well-advised to give some second, third, and fourth thoughts to what's being accelerated toward.
A prescient warning, to which I'd like to add an additional reference. I have endless admiration for the scholarship of Thomas Sowell, and in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals is an essay titled Germans and History. In it he seeks to answer the question of whether there was something unique in German culture which led to the rise of Hitler, or could such a demagogue arise again. His bottom line conclusion: "…the rise of such a man as the leader of such a people should serve as a permanent warning to all people everywhere who are charmed by charisma or aroused by rhetoric."
Thank you for emphasizing that real history is difficult, and deep insight often leads to a change in one's opinions. We live in extremely dangerous times.
and here I was thinking everything was starting to look a lot like what happen in the 1920-30's germany myself. anyway,,,I wouldn't be shocked if something like this happen again, even here.
we have the assholes in charge doing everything they can to beat the working class into a grave
before robbing them blind. take SSI for one, your average retired person gets maybe 12-15oo per month. and has to pay for medical care on top of that. then you have all the freeloaders coming in and getting a whole lot more than ANYONE WHO PAID INTO THE DAMN THING!
and that is just getting started with the stupid shit. non vax shot for everyone BUT congress ?
and another thing. why are so called E.O. treated like they came from god or something ?
who says so ? and what ever they are planning with this gun control gun grab thing will not be anything that helps people. I betting it is because they might get shot for what they plan to do after that done. remember AMMO is always the weak link- buy more ammo.
There are many many great books still available covering WW2 revisionist history, and white affairs in general, through sites such as The Barnes Review, Ostara Publications m, CODOH, Colchester Collection, Noontide Press, Patriotic Dissent and many more. Buy/dowload/copy before they censor them and start jailing for hate crimes – like they already do in most of Europe and Canaduh.
There are still some relatively brave, pragmatic and industrious white people left on the planet, but nowhere near the amount needed with the same resolve that weathered the great depression, or that came together to fight the communist hordes that were trashing their country.
Thanks to capitalist bread and circuses, jew/liberal infiltration into every facet of life, and useless christianity, Western Man has had his exceptional instincts bred and brainwashed out of him for (at least) the last 75 years. The falling demographics in white countries alone prove this hands down.
If there were in fact tens of millions of budding ubermensch waiting for a leader to appear from the ranks who in this day and age would be capable of filling that role? A Republicunt? – HA!
A Libertarian? – HA HA!
Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson, Nick Fuentes etc.? – sheeeeit!
Fill in the blank with your candidate
__________________________.
Perhaps there is a person capable of galvanizing the folk, but he'll have a lot less to work with, regardless of how desperate the situation becomes.
Yes, the great – and probably last – white reckoning is upon us but the response won't be nearly as gallant or intrepid as the previous attempts!
Prove me wrong.
Hitler, as well as countless of others from all over the globe, used rhetoric as a means to inspire his German people but he was not a demagogue!
He and his followers provided a plethora of rational arguments to back up their oratory!!
Perhaps you should avail yourself to the booksellers mentioned in my post below and expand further from conservative darlings like Williams, who usually has a good argument but stays firmly on the reservation of polite acceptability.
No movement of any size ever thinks they are the bad guys. They always believe they are doing good. The Germans of that time thought they were the good guys. The Soviets of that time thought they were the good guys. The ChiComs of Mao's time thought they were the good guys. The wokerati soldiers of globohomo think they are the good guys. The people who want to make the jabs mandatory everywhere think they are the good guys.
Whoever is onboard with The Current Thing always believes they are the good guys
That is the lesson
"Gradually, then suddenly." Hemingway. Applies to societal collapse as well as his original answer about going bankrupt.
This is Excellent !
I could never figure out Why, that litle worm of a man got to the Power he did.
Damn, as I think about it…It scares the Hell outa me.
On a number of levels.
God forbid we get a even more Soy Boy for pressy-dent than Bathhouse Barry the Magic One.
And in today’s ..Enviorment, it’s damn well a Distinct Possibility.
Systems undergoing chaotic transition do not end up with chaotic results.
There's always the exception ☹️ and the next transition. Helluva time to be alive, eh?
At least we are thinking about it, the other side assumes that spinning things out of control will be….controllable. They are going to be in for a surprise.
As the saying goes, the only reason they want to take our guns away is that they are planning on doing something people will want to shoot them for.
OTOH they've already done plenty and many are confused why they haven't been shot yet.
Well, at least it's not France?
Omitted from the discussion is the vast degree of control that Jews had over the Weimar Republic’s government, financial institutions, entertainment and media and the depths of depravity they imposed on the German people as a price to pay for survival. Rampant prostitution, drug use and psychotic experiments on the mentally ill that sound all too familiar to their claims made about “The Holocaust”. Hitler was among many who knew of the cause, he just happened to be among the few who did anything about it. The Bolsheviks and Progressives were controlled by the same pests. Masterfully they tricked our starving grandfathers into murdering their kinsmen in the name of the meaningless abstract “democracy”. The good guys lost the Second World War. They won’t lose the next one.