lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox



casually watching an old dan olsen video and suddenly struck by the idea that the nazi swastika would've been a big symbol of national pride at the time, something that's hard to really appreciate in retrospect

this feels hard to convey correctly but i fear that maybe our modern takeaways are stuff that only works in hindsight, like "i would simply not have supported the guys who were going to do incredibly evil things later"? but hitler was popular at the time, right? and i assume he didn't run on "i am going to do incredibly evil things", he ran on "i love our country and will protect it"? so why did we not learn to be suspicious of that

you are all leftists so i'm sure you are suspicious of that, but much of the world is not


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

If I recall, he was preaching hate and vitriol and definitely had clear, violent intentions. I think what's important to remember is that hate and racism are enjoyable. One of the reasons it's so hard to get someone to stop being a fascist is because they know they're hateful and violent and they're having fun. National pride, sure. They were nationalists. But they also killed or imprisoned people who didn't like it (communists, Jews, the disabled, homosexuals, Roma and so on), so he's really only popular to the people that remained.

I agree that people aren't suspicious about the right things though. Sure people correctly identify the fascism is Trumpism for example, but they sure don't have suspicions about capitalism.

The way it was once explained to me is that Hitler did in fact publish a book that listed all the violent things he intended to do in power, but the moderates said "he obviously doesn't literally mean it, that's just rhetoric."

I get that it seems like Hitler could not possibly be as evil as he's painted, but I gotta say, when you listen to his speeches, you absolutely do not gotta hand it to him, he was pretty open about some bullshit. The trick, of course, is not to assume that everybody endorsed all of that, but rather that some people were thinking "he can't do ALL that, and his opponents are ALSO terrible, so I'll hold my nose and vote for (nevermind he was couped in he didn't get elected, abandon post abandon post)

nevermind he was couped in he didn't get elected, abandon post abandon post

He won enough votes that the NSDAP became the second largest party in 1932, and was appointed as chancellor (which wasn't an elected office in the Weimar Republic) by Paul Hindenburg. The coups (e.g. eliminating competition within the party itself in the Night of the Long Knives, suppressing communist and social democrat activities under the terms of the Enabling Act) were more about removing opposition and greasing the wheels than seizing power.

He'd already had power handed to him by that point, though - he's just locking the door behind him. Seizing power is marching into Rome at the head of an army, holding the Senate at swordpoint and demanding they recommend a dictatorship (an office which by that point had been vacant for over a century) then holding the consuls at swordpoint and demanding you be the one nominated.

I suspect we have a philosophical difference over whether you consider the seizure of power as the exercise of power that leads to the proclaiming of a dictator or as an on-going process of power consolidation.

Remember, it took four years of civil war before Caesar was able to exercise his dictatorial powers uncontested, and even that lasted barely a year, its ending being enabled by his opposition retaining power in the Senate.

One thing I’ve noticed in some discussion of that time period is that, in America, opinion was kind of mixed on Nazi Germany in the early days. Some people were against it, but there were also plenty of people who agreed with it and supported it. It seems kind of like the main thing that turned sentiment against them was actually going to war against them.

In that sense, it’s kind of no wonder we never learned anything. We didn’t fight the Nazis because they were bad, we did it because they were Our Enemy, and though we kind of retroactively narrativized that we fought them because they were evil, we never really dealt with that fundamental distinction.

Hitler was extremely clear about his intentions to commit genocide and enslavement in order to gain Lebensraum, and Nazi domestic propaganda was deliberately designed to tap into deep-seated prejudices against people like the Jews of Germany that Hitler deemed racial enemies, and blamed for Germany's troubles.

He offered a very seductive message to cishet ethnic Germans, which was help him purge the racial/moral/spiritual 'corruption' from Germany, and 'rescue' the ethnic Germans under the tyranny of 'subhumans', and they can retire to a farm in eastern Europe, where they never have to lift a finger because the fields will be worked by their Slavic slaves until the need for them was automated away and they could be finally eradicated too.

This is what Hitler was promising in those speeches that made him popular, but even then, there was still a significant proportion of the German population that was against him, or had only been cowed into complicity by violence and intimidation.

The problem, then and now, is that people refuse to believe that evil can be so barefaced.

this is kind of what i mean — you say he was clear about his intentions to commit genocide, but the bits you put in quotes are about "purging corruption" and "rescue" and hey those could mean anything. they are obviously massive dogwhistles now, but that's because they make me think of the nazis.

i don't know what all he actually said though, and given the length of the history i'm not sure where to even begin getting a clear idea of what the average german thought of him in 1930

The scare quotes is me using euphemisms to avoid having to explain Nazi racial ideology, or go into detail about the territories that Germany ceded in the Treaty of Versailles, or how the Nazis used the pretext of the oppression of ethnic Germans (the banning of the Austrian Nazi party was one of these oppressions) to justify the annexations and military interventions.

There isn't a single book I'd consider definitive on the subject of how the average German viewed him, but Hitler himself has never been my specific area of interest. I have always been much more concerned with the questions of what motivates collaboration with the perpetrators of a genocide, and how do you disrupt it.

That said, I would suggest the The Coming of the Third Reich as a good place to start to find the answer to your question, though the first volume of Volker Ullrich's biography on Hitler, Hilter: Ascent 1889-1939, would probably also be a decent choice, but both can be a bit of a slog to read.

It's pretty interesting to look at contemporary newspaper reports for this kind of thing, although obviously if you can't read German you aren't getting the full story. I don't know about for American newspapers, but the National Library of Australia's Trove is a great source for Australian papers. (As far as I recall from history class, Mussolini is much more of an example of what you're talking about than the Nazis, which seems to be borne out by the newspapers.)

Here's one about the Nazis, from 1930: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/67742802
And here's a practically propagandist piece, in the Melbourne newspaper of record (!), about Mussolini from 1924: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/203641347

afaict that bit's mostly just a summary of the party platform https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Program_of_the_NSDAP

as i recall the nazis did in fact make some effort before 1933 to keep a thin sliver of daylight between the official party line and -- well, not antisemitism, they were quite openly antisemitic, but kind of baser hatred. e.g. der sturmer (which published horrible 1920s groyper shit like these caricatures https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/sturm28.htm ), although it was published by a very high-ranking member of the nazi party, wasn't an official nazi party organ. although i assume most people who were not extremely oblivious would understand that the contents had at least hitler's tacit endorsement.

yes, and as well (like certain figures i could name) people didn't really take hitler seriously until it was too late. he was known for his ranting, raving oratory which fired up his base but sounded ridiculous to many others; it seemed like he was all bark and no bite.
in 1930, before his rise to power:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/242808556
and in 1933, even just after he was made chancellor (!!), people still did not really take him seriously:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/277051693
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228904710
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/247103439