hitler’s policies were wildly popular. and that’s the problem. people are dumb and like doing things that are actually bad for them. it’s like the chimpanzee that likes eating salty food, even though it kills him.
Humans are basically diseased chimps so… go figure.
Wake up at 5am and do your bed and Iron your clothes before some dickhead screams you up a hill and then teaches you a class of shit you still don’t care about? Then you get to shovel some pig shit?
Wow. Sign me up.
/S
This was the premise of the TV movie The Wave that came out in the early 80s.
I mean, I can imagine kids feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. That education is very palpable - girls that age fawn over babies and family life, and boys would rather work the fields as long as they get recognition for it. The open choice of what to do with your life is daunting, so the promise of actual skills instead of algebra is appealing. It’s basically the return to “learn a trade” we’re going through now.
All in all, a suboptimal hangup for a negative Nazi image. Hitlerjugend etc. were popular programs. Like boy scouts but with (realistically probably “more”) indoctrination.
Popular? They were also compulsory.
I think the experiment worked pretty well.
It showed that nazi ideals are juvenile.
My kids idolize the garbage men and construction workers. Nothing wrong with that, but those are jobs whose purpose and value children immediately recognize. That is unlike, say, a virologist or insurance adjuster.
Gotta be honest I don’t think that’s why kids idolize them. I think that’s just the heavy machinery
Then they all stood up, looked to the flag and pledged allegiance under god.
Jesus Christ. This comment made me remember that American schools actually do that daily. It was like a repressed memory. I had to actually look it up to make sure it wasn’t a fever dream or something. I never participated because even as a kid it just seemed so fucking weird to me. Nobody ever gave me shit about it. We weren’t forced to do it or anything. But it was still a daily occurrence before the morning announcements.
When I learned that we didn’t have to do it I stopped. But my home room teacher was a veteran and he did not take it well. Sent me the principal’s office (they just sent me back). A few other kids then stopped too.
once again proving that veterans are some of the worst people
And everyone clapped
It’s easier to think of Nazis as just evil and incompetent. The uncomfortable truth is that a significant part of their platform was popular, especially in the beginning of their rule. They were also extremely competent early on, it wasn’t until Hitler was in full on drug psychosis that things started going down hill. Expecting something the Nazis did, especially early on to be unpopular and a massive red flag is just foolish on the teacher.
It would be better if we focused more on the uncomfortable parts of Nazi Germany. Their militarization efforts pulled them out of global recession faster than everyone else. Jewish segregation was inspired by the US treatment of African Americans. Jesse Owens was treated better in Nazi Germany than in the US despite being a national hero. The eugenics movement was also massively popular in the US and elsewhere. There was a lot of luck involved in the war in Europe going as well as it did, Germany winning wasn’t ever really realistic unless the US aided them, but things could have been much worse.
They were also extremely competent early on, it wasn’t until Hitler was in full on drug psychosis that things started going down hill.
In a lot of ways, it’s not that they were competent, it’s that the more popular parts of their policies (e.g. public spending, job creation programs) were running on borrowed time - the government kind of strong-armed the banks into funding them, and if they were ever going to pay them back, it was through spoils of war. I guess it takes some kind of competency to put that plan into action…
Funnily enough, that’s what I expect a government to do (except for the war part). Invest into the future, reap the rewards later. It’s very difficult to bring about change without credit of some sort. That’s why I’m always confused by the debt ceiling debate in the US - assuming the money would be invested into the country and not siphoned off, which I know is naive. But investing money it doesn’t have (yet) is one of the main levers a government has, usually supported by taxes in the following years.
You’re not wrong. If you could be reasonably certain that you’re 1. going to win the war and 2. win the war without too much damage to your own country, it would be a sound investment. The Nazis probably had enough overconfidence to believe both of those.
You make it sound like spoils of war wasn’t the main income for Europe for pretty much all of history until then. Colonialism put a little nicer name on it.
most of europe had very little income from international trade until 1800 or sth
After industrialization, selling industrial products was frequently far more profitable than the expensive and uncertain spoils of war. Even colonialism was frequently a net loss for the governments.
And there wasn’t really a likely reality where Nazi Germany fought their war in a way that was actually winnable, their overconfidence was only matched by the idiocy of many of their tactic and strategic decisions.
Even colonialism was frequently a net loss for the governments.
noteworthy the british empire never turned a profit for england at all. it was losses all the way through. the english wikipedia article mentions it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
edit: nvm i can’t find it anymore rn. probably i remembered badly
this article (Economy of the British Empire) mentions that it was profitable.
Also, duckduckgoing it, there are quite a few sources that still claim that the British Empire wasn’t profitable for the government in Britain, or regular British people, e.g.:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598015
https://iea.org.uk/media/empire-and-slavery-did-not-make-britain-rich-finds-new-iea-book/
(I’m not that knowledgable about the quality of these particular sources, just demonstrating that the claim isn’t rare)
TBH the “Economy of the British Empire” article is poorly sourced, especially for the claim that Britain profited from its colonies - the linked source is a Fortune article (even if it has help from an economic historian from Stanford), with only one paragraph on the British empire, and the relevant sentance seems to be this:
“At the height of the British Empire, about 6% of its total output came from its colonies, more than any other Western power.”
I don’t really understand what this is supposed to mean, since according to the table in the Wikipedia article, British India’s GDP was higher than the UK’s. 6% certainly doesn’t sound impressive. But even then, GDP =/= profit, and being the worldwide dominant power is not really a status that most colonial powers can hope to achieve.
You’re right about colonialism being a net loss for the government. In the Netherlands the NSB (Dutch Nazi Party) based a lot of their messaging around the idea that if the Netherlands were to join up with the allied forces, they would be forced to relinquish their colonies.
This was absolute nonsense but it spoke to people at the time because the idea of giving the colonies their independence had become a popular talking point during the recession because they were no longer profitable (fuckery involving the united fruit company).
During the second world war the Dutch colonies would become profitable but for completely different reasons. Basically a lot of the fosfate used in bombs came from Curacao and the aluminum to craft airplanes came from Suriname.
You’re right in what you say but it’s not relevant to this discussion. Colonialism is a very different MO than attacking neighboring countries.
Eh, Nazi Germany basically attacked Poland to do settler colonialism (or at least that was the regime’s justification). Main difference is that the Poles were more developed that e.g. the Native Americans.
IMO the error is assuming that it was likely to be successful and profitable, war/colonialism is generally not sound government policy.
It’s a matter of distance really. Germany raiding France or Brazil isn’t functionally different.
brazil didn’t yet have weapons to attack the homeland, france did
reason it was popular is because they… delivered on a lot of their political promises.
the german economy was in shambles in the 20s and early 30s and they made it boom. people like that.
and they made it boom.
By taking on unrepayable levels of debt and stealing from Jewish citizens
“It’s the economy stupid” is probably the most applicable statement to how political success happens across all systems and ages.
and yet, despite all the ‘genius’ of our political consultant class, they can’t seem to understand that. because they are so blinded by ‘social issues’, at least in the USA.
and when candidates focus on economic issues and less on social ones… they do way better at the polls and have better approval ratings… especially when their policies make a positive and visible economic impact…
but then again, in USA at least, our political class is so totally detached from economic reality of the voter, so i suppose it’s inevitable, really.
the USA politicians understand perfectly well that it’s all about the economic situation. yet they have already decided that they won’t tax the rich (because their rich friends say so) so they need to make up excuses and divert the attention to other topics instead. at least that’s how it has been for the last 3 elections that i actually looked at up-close.
It’s not so much that the political consultants don’t understand that. It’s more that they can’t do anything about it: That would mean changing our economic structure to help out the workers, rather than their rich friends.
George Carlin said it clearly. “Cause the owners of this country won’t allow it”
The problem is that it didn’t carry on further. The beginnings of most ideologies sound fine but it’s the reality and the shunning of “the other” where you start to see the horrors.
See, and even this could lead into a fantastic lesson about how fascism is really seductive in these vague terms, especially to help clean up a lot of the questions of “well why didn’t people fight back” that teens have when learning about Italy and Germany pre-WWII.
hindsight is easy.
i can look back on every thing that happened to me in the past and it’s clear what was wrong. but when you are living through it, you can’t see that. it was not obvious and clear, it was confusing and I did the best that I could with the limited information I had, nobody is omniscient. but when we look back on the past it seems ‘so obvious’ because we have… way more information and experience and context than when have in the moment, especially the time to take all that info and process it.
and it’s stupidly arrogant to assume some average person of limited means and intelligence could see how ‘evil’ things around them were. only a minority of the population is looking at some big picture of what their government is doing, most folks just care about food on their table and are totally consumed by day to day life.
admitting we are limited beings that make mistakes or just are totally blind to horrible things… is painful and scary.
it’s obvious some people just have 0 empathy
Yeah, the whole thing is that most of this sounds good until you have to be part of it as it plays out. It just gets worse, and worse, and the people become more, and more, polarized about the situation. The problems with the ideas, which should have been obvious from the beginning, start to take effect in ways that finally start to hurt the people it was proposed to support. Then the system goes into collapse.
people are more than happy to commit horrors on others.
that’s the whole point, you want a well-defined group to be able to blame, torture, and kill. because this groups existence is the ‘problem’ that is holding back your ideal society from existing.
and every ideology has this. they all need an amorphous boogeyman and as a label to condemn their non-believers.
And what happens when you have wiped out that group? Are there other similar examples to look at that didn’t get stamped out so quickly and were able to collapse internally instead
Jews have been the scapegoat since for ever, when stuff didn’t go right pogroms happened. In the case of Nazi Germany, the discrimination lasted long enough to show that the scapegoat keeps being used, even when the minorities have been wiped out. So much of the defeats were blamed on vague and unknown inner enemies, aided by or aiding the Jews, even when there was no supporting evidence for this.
Didn‘t really complete the experiment. None of the horrors of auch a system. Wait until one of them didn‘t want the job and wanted to do something else. Straight to a work camp. Or executed. Women forced to stay at home an bang out kids. Etc.
The sad truth is, that even a percentage of the class could have it really good under the system. Just an arbitrary group would disappear (let’s say all names starting with L). If one overlooked the horror the system can still be popular.
The lesson would be that popular is not moral.
But such a system needs it obvious that the percentage has it good at the expense of the rest, and that and the rest don‘t have the power to change it. There are a lot of possible arrangements…everyone does good because the few get sacrificed (a strange sacrificial dystopia), the few get sacrificed for no gain and evryone keeps their head down because they‘re worked to death and it doesn‘t affect them directly (US now), or the sacrifices are deliberate and chosen to keep the population at large in fear and controlled (places like Nazi Germany or possibly Russia).
There aren‘t too many realistic situations I can think of where a system would be widely popular while the masses are deliberarely and knowingly killing people to propel it - and I don‘t mean to compare that to something like health caee industry ROI to investors by denying claims.
> fascism appeals to the stupidest, most brutish, hierarchy-oriented people in society > Give young teens a tasteWow, that does not wrap in thunder.
Hooray Voyager
Uhh, why is Voyager wrapping code blocks?
summit wraps it too
Nevermind code block aren’t supposed to wrap you can scroll them by swiping. I am the idiot.
I’m more disturbed by the fact that it does wrap in Voyager… Ew.
Not in boost either. Alas
Nevermind code block aren’t supposed to wrap you can scroll them by swiping. I am the idiot.
To be fair learning to farm and do military shit sounds way funner than the actual crap you’re doing throughout most of school.
Learning to do military shit was way less fun than school. A not inconsiderable amount of time is spent doing domestic chores. The rest of the time is spent sitting in class.
i was at the military (we have to in my country) for a few months and what we did was 20% eat, 40% sports, 30% sit around and 10% drink.
Basic for me involved polishing boots/shoes, folding shirts, making bed, keeping room clean, ironing clothes, gym, laundry, hastily gobbled meals, cleaning rifle, academics, drill and about three weeks of combined field training with sleep deprivation.
But a 14 year old isn’t going to know that. They’d be thinking about shooting guns and doing obstacles and driving tanks around and shit like that.
Yah but kids are to dumb to know that yet
The history teacher should have read up on blue eyes/brown eyes experiment and copied that one instead: https://appliedhuman.com/social-experiments,/sociology,/1968/2023/11/07/jane-elliott-blue-brown-eyes.html
I know I’m scarred from that roleplaying scenario. We did in middle school too
Wow you guys actually did it? I could definitely imagine this would fuck with a middle schoolers mind
I wonder if Brandon Sanderson had read this when he was writing the Stormlight Archives. The main society seen in it has a caste system based on eye color.
The problem is that actually running such an experiment properly and bringing home the conclusion of the horrors of fascism would be grossly unethical and impossible to do. (Some university psychology/sociology courses did similar things in the 1960s, though experimental ethics rules back then were flimsy.)
we need fewer ethics boards
Funnily enough that’s what the Nazis said
I thought they mostly went with the nonperson human supply route
I liked this one better:
It may be time to watch that one again
Oh shit right, this movie exists. One of my teachers played this for us during high school. I was scammed so hard cause the only movie my classmates ever saw that had water polo in it was about nazis 💀
It was a book first. I read it as a kid in the 90s. Extremely impactful to my young brain.
fake: anon goes to school
gay: separated from girls
