The German Problem (video 15:48)

youtube.com ^ | Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson

[RoosterRedux]

This is a good discussion between Peterson and Ferguson of Germany's decline into the barbarism that led to WWII.

Here are a couple of quotes from the transcript. These quotes make the discussion seem like a Captain Obvious discourse, but it isn't. The back-and-forth between Peterson and Ferguson touches on some interesting insights that are relevant to what is going on in the U.S. and world today.

Ferguson: [The critical thing is that] it was the enormous power of Hitler as a demonic and charismatic leader capable of displacing Christian ethics (that led to Germany's downfall). Hitler calls on German Society to renounce Christian ethics and that is why by the early 1940s educated German men are engaged in the kind of barbaric behavior that we associate with the Holocaust.

Ferguson: All Societies have the propensity to be led into unfreedom it is not some peculiarity of German society as you hinted at earlier. It is possible for all free societies to be seduced by a demagogue and then kept in un Freedom by a fatal combination of prosperity (the Nazi economy was much more successful than the Weimar economy), propaganda (Goebbels was an evil genius), and then coercion (the regime became progressively more coercive over time). [Germany] used Terror initially in a targeted way by the end in a blanket way...and these three forces together can subjugate even the most advanced society.

[higgmeister]

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