10-31-2016, 10:47 AM
(10-30-2016, 06:18 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:(10-28-2016, 06:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I hate to bring up Hitler... but he never promised to leave a Germany a nation in shame and ruin, disgraced for what its armies and paramilitary forces did to millions, and partitioned by foreign powers. He never promised the Holocaust, let alone aggressive war that would allow American and Soviet armies to meet. Hitler never promised a war even more destructive than World War II. Of course Hitler may not have wanted such things, even the Holocaust, in 1932. Hitler sought to bring back national pride, and by 1936 the Germans (unless they were Jewish) were proud to be Germans. In 1946 "German" was a badge of shame.
Actually, Hitler did promise the Holocaust. From the get-go, he wanted to rid Germany of the evil influence of Jews. You can see that in his writings. Getting rid of the Jews was part of his plan to restore the pride and purity of the German nation.
Hitler hated the Jews from at least November 1918, blaming them for the defeat of his beloved Germany (never mind that Germany had run out of infantrymen, its economy had collapsed, and Wilhelm II panicked and fled). But even he knew enough to downplay that hatred as necessary for winning seats for his crime syndicate (the Nazi Party) in the Reichstag. As with other persons with evil personalities he made sure to hide his vilest tendencies to avoid scaring people off. He also had to seem useful to economic elites who had other interests, like destroying the labor unions, privatizing the public sector, offering lucrative contracts for rearmament, and suppressing leftist political groups. Threats to Jewish property would have to give way to protecting the plutocrats who knew that someone with the power to dispossess the Jews could dispossess anyone (which also proved true to the few plutocrats who got in Hitler's way, let alone those outside Germany).
Hitler threatened at most (at first) to make life miserable for Jews, which was abominable enough in itself to have rightly given shame to any German*. He was concerned about how the rest of the world perceived him. He would have been satisfied at first to get every Jew to leave Germany while stealing whatever assets Jews had. That was all that he had available -- basically what the Inquisition did except for allowing no outlet of conversion -- until 1941, when he started the Holocaust in occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Then he could murder at will under the fog of war or under complete secrecy.
Hitler learned his techniques of mass murder from the expert of the time -- Josef Stalin -- and applied those to the Jews with modifications to suit the realities of Germany. Hitler simply had to do the killing outside of Germany, taking Jews out of and even through Germany for slaughter in Poland. He had much learning to do about such in 1933 and 1934. He learned well and his collaborators were as clever as they were cruel and ruthless as he.
It took Hitler about six years to become a bigger killer than such vile leaders as Agosto Pinochet, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, or Leopold II of Belgium. He had to start believing that he could get away with it. When he had victory in sight and complete power over everyone he could begin.
Could Hitler have promised the extermination of the Jews in 1932 or 1933? Hardly. Civilized people just do not do that. Barbarous people like the Mongols and Crusaders of the Middle Ages, or the Soviet Union of the time, could. The most sophisticated and technologically advanced, and one of the most learned? Of course not. Who did Hitler think the Germans were -- tobacco-spewing, superstitious, semi-literate hicks in the American South of the time?
*The example of blacks in the segregated South shows how easy it is for people to slough off an unconscionable order so long as it hurts helpless 'others'.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.