sucker born every minute!
Explaining Hitler's appeal over there is easy. It's the Hasslehoff thing that's more mystifying.
To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society.
Sounds amazingly similar to the methods of Democrats.
After trying to ty Hitler to Bush and Reagan for tax breaks she has to admit that Hitler was a Socialist pure and simple.
Interesting. Napoleon fell into essentially the same trap. He had to keep expanding, as new plunder was essential to finance his existing military machine, on which his power was based. His attempt to expand into Russia was obviously one country too far, as was Hitler's attempt to do the same.
Public schools rewrote history and Hitler youth groups taught the children to report their parents to their teachers for anti-Nazi remarks. Such parents disappeared. Pagan animism became the state religion of the Third Reich and Christians were widely condemned as "right wing fanatics".
They weren't called the National Socialist Party for nothing. Only today the socialists don't enslave a class of people. They take about half the earnings from the productive in taxes and re-distribute those taxes to a non-productive class who are numerically greater.
Of course; this explains Germany to a "t."
"The book could have been written 10 years ago, even 20 years ago," he says. All of the documents were there. We just weren't open to them. Personally, I didn't have the questions then."
There are plenty of books that have already been written with similar ideas, I've had to read a few of them. In my last semester of college all I needed was to collect a few credits. I liked history, so I took Nazi Germany because it fit my time slot. Well, this ex-Harvard professor comes in and give us the class reading list that included 5 rather large books, many of which covered the same things this article did. Apparently Germans weren't interested in these painful memories back then.
Germany was in terrible shape - European-wide economic depression, and they had taken the worst of it to go along with the brunt, blame and punishment for WWI. Hitler played on national pride to overcome his political competitors. Bit by bit, the people feeling better about themselves and began surrendering freedoms as a minor trade off. By the time people realized that things were amiss, they were already in too deep. The one thing Nazis did was to equate themselves to Nationalism. Anything said negatively against the Nazis was treasonous, and with secret police and fear running rampant - friends and neighbor would turn each other in. Nationalism became the excuse and justification for everything.
The truth of this seems to be lost on the Left in Iraq - where they insist that Saddam and a few henchmen were the only bad guys, and thus the invasion was unnecessary and we are acting as "imperialists". No dictatorship survives without significant popular support, and much of our post-war troubles have been caused by those supporters - who lived the good life under Saddam and face uncertain futures under a democratic government.
You desperately want to hope that these people were forced to put up with what happened, but the reality is that many participated, even cheered the public execution of Jewish children in the town square. Holding their own children on their shoulders for a better look!
What this guy's really trying to do, is take the heat off of Nazi Germany for what they were really all about, which was racial hatred and a thirst for conquest.
The Soviet Union also propped up its economy with slave labor. Many people in normal Soviet society lived in some degree of comfort. They pretended to work, and the State pretended to apy them, and they got by okay. All the while, millions toiled in slave labor camps, freezing their butts off in misery so that others could live the socialist lifestyle that some now look back on fondly.
But we don't get an Oscar-winning movie every year or two about the evils of communism, do we? Every year or two we get a first-rate movie about the Holocaust. It is important that we never forget what Germany did, but it is also imporatnt that we remember what communuism did. Not just Stalin, or a few bad leaders, but communism itself.
Uh, would that be because he used the Jewish slave labor to reduce manufacturing costs?
read later bump
RE: Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.
Not if, but when we are attacked in earnest by the anti Western Axis (what has happened thus far is nothing) we can fully expect them to use a similar methodology.