'Hitler just wanted to make Germany great,' Candace Owens of Trump-aligned TPUSA says in London

boing
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Fair enough. I guess it had a ring of truth to it in the sense that if they made tanks someone had to make the tanks. Assuming there was no tank-building industry before that, that looks like employment. For people who aren’t thinking past their rent and food budget for the next week, that job feels like the country is going in the right direction.

But you’d know better than I whether there is any validity to that. North Korea claims that North Korea is doing great, but the reality is mass starvation.

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“Much suggests, in fact, that between the death of Hindenburg in August 1934 and the expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland four years later Hitler was indeed successful in gaining the backing of the vast majority of the German people, something of immeasurable importance for the disastrous course of German policy ahead. Apart perhaps from the immediate aftermath of the astonishing victory in France in summer 1940, Hitler’s popularity was never higher than at the height of his foreign-policy successes in 1938.” The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People - DER SPIEGEL

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I don’t see “Trump improves the lot of the average joe” happening. That’s only happening in a propagandistic sense, as it did earlier.

Obviously Nazis were popular with some Germans in Nazi Germany, and Trump is popular with people who like Trump. In both cases, you are attributing popularity to effective economic management that really isn’t there.

The scary lesson from history isn’t that the racist boss might make us rich, it’s that people believe racist bosses that don’t actually make them rich.

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It was also against the Versailles treaty for them to have been building tanks…

Some people might have felt that way, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t built on a house of sand. Much could be said of the Soviet economy of the 1930s - based on propaganda and brutally eliminating some people from the economy, Stalin made it look like it was growing at the same time that western economies were struggling. Many Americans, among other people, went to the Soviet Union for work, and to them it seemed like the propaganda was true. But it wasn’t really all that stable of an economic model over the long term.

Part of the problem that Roosevelt and others hit on during the depression was that short term thinking doesn’t work in the long term. It was only 6 years from the time the Nazis took over to the start of WW2. It’s not really that long of a time to make an economy seem productive.

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i’ve been wondering exactly that about the us numbers lately.

anecdotally, in my neck of the country, more people do seem to be working. that said, inflation and rent are still rising, and while pay - at my job - is slightly up, hours are down - so income is flat, and buying power steadily dropping. debt seems everywhere ( not me thank goodness. ) gofundmes flood the facebook feeds.

the “economy” never seems to mean people’s day to day lives, only corporate earnings and stocks. even so - it’s not clear to me: should economic reports from this administration be bandied about as the “truth”?

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Narrator:
They should NOT.

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The majority of Germans (those who weren’t being murdered) felt better off, and purely in terms of employment and output the economy was objectively improved. Hence the increasing support for the Fuhrer, compounded by the military and territorial gains he delivered. But it was not sustainable; as others have said, it was a palace built on sand. If Hitler hadn’t over-reached in attacking Russia, perhaps he could eventually have pulled it off, enslaving most of Europe and Africa, holding off an America that was extremely reluctant to get involved, and then there would be a Philip K Dick -like alternative world.

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I don’t think so… but I’d say that about the economy under previous administrations too. Income has been relatively flat since the 70s, the same time we had waves of deregulation (from Reagan on).

I’d also say you have to ask what kind of jobs people have, when you hear the unemployment numbers.

The problem in trying to tell a simple story about the economy is just how complicated that picture really is. Is the main metric of a “healthy” economy the stock market going up, expansion, and low unemployment - we really need to dig into the numbers to get a better sense of what this all actually means in people’s daily life. Maybe gross national happiness really IS a better metric of economic wellness?

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I don’t pay attention to the unemployment numbers. There’s enough work out there to have 120% employment and keep adding more people to fill the void. The pay starts at 0 and goes up exponentially for a few and very slightly for everyone else. Costs, on the other hand, balloon quite nicely. The work is also mostly unbearably miserable and would be more tolerable if you could do it in a comatose state, or it’s backbreaking, or it’s emotionally eviscerating… but you were born to do it because you were born. So, what the fuck could that number really mean then?

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Even within that article, they acknowledge the role of intimidation in the public perception of Hitler. In your posts you are representing fear as admiration, conflating relief for approval. Blips of happiness within the constant weight of intimidation. Before the death of Hindenburg, German conservatives feared Hitler but thought they could use him. Afterwards, they knew their survival was dependent on going along with the Nazis. Even that would prove to be insufficient.

One of the reasons that people are rightly concerned about Trump is the precedent. Despite never really winning over the majority of common Germans, Hitler and the Nazis ran Germany into the ground.

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Also how “unemployment” is defined in different eras (or years). It’s never been “percentage of people not working”.

And GDP is generally just a gross measure of how much stuff got moved around. Wildly different countries can have similar GDP and pundits attributing wildly different causes. It certainly doesn’t speak to how happy people would feel in a world of disappearing neighbors.

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Living in a violent dictatorship tends to make people embrace the leader, however they really feel about them.

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That might be an overly optimistic view of human nature, from someone who lives in a still nominally “liberal” democracy. Much as we’d like to think that Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, WW2 militaristic Japan, the genocide in Rwanda and other monstrous regimes did not have popular support, it can be argued that history tends to suggest otherwise. Even Kim Jong Un seems to have considerable, perhaps majority popular support in North Korea. They really do love him. Don’t discount the role that toxic nationalism, big man personality cults and other “isms” can have in appealing to a bunch of social apes.

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No one has nearly 100% support from their population. No one.

And pretty much any metric of support promoted by a regime (democratic or not) tends to lean towards some level of propaganda. Yes, even in a democracy, propaganda is employed to support the people in power.

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Oh come on when not expressing how happy you are can land you execution for treason of course they are happy. When you have to be happy you’ll be happy-- see Stolkholm syndrome for an example. People adapt to survive.

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That sure is a lot of “people happy because of full employment”.

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The economy isn’t the sole reason people support dictators and autocrats. There is also toxic nationalism (yellow vests), beating up on unpopular racial minorities (Mayanmar, Rwanda, Hitler), “big man” autocracies, etc; and usually some combination or the above. But it is rare that autocrats take over when economies are serving the majority well.

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re: rwanda –

the hutus and the tutsis are not distinguished by ethnicity, language, or religion. ( link if you need. )

from that article (and same for wikipedia, and others. )

According to some historians… the only difference between the two groups were economic.

but it goes deeper:

In Burundi, the minority Tutsis maintained their control of the military and government through a campaign of violence against the Hutus. Although they lost multi-party elections in 1993, two assassinations and a military coup have allowed the Tutsis to remain in power.

basically, inequality in power was arguably the source of genocide. tutsis generally had more power, but were a minority of people. the back and forth between the two groups – stoked by colonialism – resulted in the genocide.

economics is “just” a form of power, and i think it’s arguably the fight over power:, who can hold land, who can vote, who gets favored by law enforcement, etc. that’s the real key. economics – and especially economic disparity – is just a symptom of the disease.

those who are in power will often use every tool at their disposal: money, law, creating or stoking racial division, war – to hold on to power.

when you said:

The majority of Germans (those who weren’t being murdered) felt better off, and purely in terms of employment and output the economy was objectively improved.

i think it’s actually beside the point ( and im not sure that it is true; others have argued well against it. )

what really matters is whether the minority in power are better off.

sure there is a calculus about keeping the masses “happy enough” – but there’s another calculus about keeping them scared enough, or starved enough. really, whatever works.

fascism is like a cancer. it survives because it survives. there’s no single fascism, no single cancer. and when cancer “wins”, it eats the host. same with fascism.

that’s the heart of why – for me – owens’ statement is so disturbing. hilter couldn’t have made germany great through fascism; not in any alternate history.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

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Indeed. We saw the same thing in Northern Ireland; while ostensibly about ethnicity/religion (Catholic vs protestant), it was really about an minority group holding power and economically oppressing the majority Republicans. Same in Bahrain, with Sunni vs Shia, in Palestine, etc; conflicts result from power inequalities, and hence economic inequality, with ethnicity or religion often being a convenient excuse for the exercise of that power. I’m not sure there is much to gain in trying to differentiate between the two; when power is abused on a national basis, it is nearly always for economic purposes. You can say “it’s not about money, it’s about power”, but when you get down to it, power is about money, so it circles back.

“Keeping the masses happy”; there is a fine line. Misjudge it, or fail, and you can end up on a meat hook like Mussolini, or with a bullet in the head like Ceausescue

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at the risk of derailing from the overall conversation – i’m not sure that money is an end in and of itself. it’s always about what money will buy. especially these days because neo-liberalism says markets rule all, and therefore money can buy everything. land rights, speech, freedom from prosecution, your own senator. etc.

but that philosophy is already a corruption of the ideal of democratic control. where instead of the rule of law, and things like taxation for the common weal – there’s just money.

the reason that’s useful is that a very few folks have all the money right now. so if you can believe that money is power, those people also have the all power.

that’s not what we should want though. we should want elections that are free of the influence of money. we should want rich law breakers to be held accountable to the same standards of poor law breakers. we should everyone to have access to the same public institutions, rich or poor.

i think it’s already a step down the road to fascism to reduce political power to being the same as economic power. the whole point of political power should be to reign in the power that money would otherwise buy you.

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