Posted on 05/31/2016 8:06:01 AM PDT by Beave Meister
Hamburg, Germany — WE Germans can never escape the trauma of our recent history. That has rarely been clearer than today, as we look around our Continent and across the Atlantic. There are almost too many differences to mention between what happened in the 1930s over here and what is going on today. And it goes without saying that Donald J. Trump and Austria’s Norbert Hofer are not Adolf Hitler. Still, Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism.
Setting aside debate about whether the rise of Nazism was built into the German DNA, there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder. To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today.
First, the history. The Black Friday stock-market collapse of 1929 set off a global depression. As bad as things were in America, they were even worse in Germany, where industrial production shrank by half in the following three years. Stocks lost two-thirds of their value. Inflation and unemployment skyrocketed. The Weimar government, already held in low esteem by many Germans, seemed to have no clue about what to do.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why not? Do the elites have a vested interest in consistently debasing your culture so as to create a sense of guilt and self loathing, because it serves their agenda?
Because I think they do.
The sad thing is that they buy into it. If they didn’t, Germany would never have been taken over by Turks and Syrians.
“Because I think they do. “
Yep, guilt is very good when you’re trying to control people. It only works on Westerners though.
I think the Japanese know their fair share of guilt also. But unlike the Germans, the press & media haven’t harped on them as much.
So backwards.
Crazy leftists think being against importing today’s equivalent of the Nazis in to your country is being like the Nazis.
Up is down. Good is evil. Night is day.
I wonder why so many black males are homosexual.
That is why they expose their underpants and rear-ends to us right?
The main point he misses is that the elites can act this way right now because the regimes in the West now are not particularly democratic-- there seems instead to be a worldwide convergence towards corrupt, kleptocratic authoritarian regimes.
” Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s “
Note the only thing I see coming out of Trump’s mouth that could be construed as “authoritarian” is per immigration. That is not authoritarian, that is establishing order along constitutional lines.
In fact, today, given the amount of government authority and its abuse of it, you can hardly describe the U.S. as “liberal”.
The majority of European countries in the 1930s were “authoritarian.”
That's been the norm throughout human history, now hasn't it?
Anytime there is a breath of nationalism or a desire for national sovereignty, out come the cries of Nazi/Fascist/Rasist/Xenophobe. I think they have a key on their typewriters that has that phrase on it, just to save time.
Screw the foreign owned NY Times.
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