No, we don’t have to understand it, because it hasn’t been demonstrated to be true.
How are large corporations also governments? With cites, please.
I’m guessing that Hitler’s program of mass privatization made the oligarchs pretty happy. I don’t know how many German industrialists got a charge out of anti-Jewish bigotry, but over in the US Henry Ford certainly did.
Your post is misleading. Firstly, most privatization in the thirties was a consequence of the Great Depression and private firms falling into public hands.
This paper http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.pdf explains it like this:
The motives for returning companies back into private hands was a pragmatic decision designed to help the state coffers,
and
So you see that there is no parallel between the German experience in the 1930’s and today.
I certainly choose not to see the problem and its putative solutions in the model that TPTB have defined for us - and I include academic political screw-heads in that group.
You want a revolution? That’s the one that’s utterly in the hands of the population, no cooperation from the powers needed and very little they can do to block it.
Or you can go challenge them on their self-defined grounds of laws and taxes and programs and (eventually) National Guard and military… <fx Morgan Freeman> “Good luuuck!” </fx>
That’s one possible outcome, but only if you try to execute the revolution within the existing structure. Success won’t come from just reduced consumer spending: it will come from an utterly revolutionized notion of what citizen-as-consumer and vice-versa means.
Lets take a look at the conclusion of the paper. They say there were a number of factors involved, among them kissing up to industrialists:
Emphasis added. So yeah, the Nazis were cozy with their industrialist supporters. They organized a familiar coalition between populist bigots and monied interests.
This is how some people get to talking about a revolution, when they believe silly things like this. Neither liberals or conservatives have a stronger hold on tyranny.
If you want to find someone to blame - blame Ronald Reagan. He’s the guy who managed to popularize the idea that government wasn’t the solution to problems: government WAS the problem.
Amen. And he was building on the efforts of St. Milhous, who managed to eliminate the hands-off respect for the Presidency.
Oversight of government is a good thing. Transparency in public actions is a good thing. Hyper-second-guessing every move every government official makes is corrosive. Either elect/appoint/establish positions you can place some inherent trust in, or go hide in the woods of Idaho with the other preppers.
Except for those other 200 years of Americans who believed when possible it is better to rely on oneself. And you blatently ignore the vast corruption in the political organizations that promised to help people. Ever heard of Tammany Hall?
Its not the government thats the problem; its the people who run the government.
Lol…where were you during GWB’s administration? Thats actually a part of our democracy. The opposition keeps close tabs on those in power.
This kind of phrasing supposes that citizens, government workers and government are three distinct entities, when in truth they are one.
To vaguely despise ‘government’ as some unneeded cancer or third wheel is the hallmark of a willful ignoramus, IMHO.
When the government is working to enrich its leaders rather than help its citizenry, then they are not one. Are you willfully ignoring the cancer-like corruption that has poisoned government almost since the beginning of the country? Tammany Hall? Chicago? Here in SoCal The City of Bell City of Bell scandal - Wikipedia or The City of Industry Industry sues former mayor, alleging 'extensive public corruption'?
Were your nirvana-like view of government to come true we would need enlightened honest government workers. Unfortunatly, that usually isnt the case. Now, speaking of willful ignoramuses…
That means that what I said is the lesson.
I defy you to explain any “nirvana like views” in pointing out that goverment == us, and can basically be no other thing. Government is precisely what we choose it to be, on a collective basis, and to “otherize” it is to be completely misled by rhetorical nonsense.
Yes, and all cops are Mark Fuhrman when they aren’t Darren Wilson. So I guess that proves your point.
Especially as the SLA didn’t exist in the 1960s. 
But yes, you’re correct in that those who made headlines in that era were in no danger of making policy.
The industrialists funded the National Socialists so they could control them. They wanted to make sure they directed the anger of the working class away from the wealthy by providing them with alternative targets: foreigners and Jews.
In a multi-national multi-ethnic society like ours, the government can never be ‘us’ because there is no ‘us’. When since the hunters and gatherers have our leaders been us? The government in a democratic society is decided by interest groups of various political persuasions with often conflicting goals. At any one moment the government represents some of us. Who does the government in the City of Bell represent?
I think ideally the government should be ‘us’ but in reality it just isnt so.
Now some say look at those big corporations. They are evil!! Others say look at big government, They are evil!! What these two views have in common is that when large groups of humans group together and wield great power they will tend to wield it in their own interest. It is smart to distrust big business and government.
Government is more dangerous than big business because they have infinitly more concentrated power. They are the military and the police and they regulate the economy. Only the government could have interred thousands of Japanese-Americans. Likewise, only the goverment could have created the national parks.
The government is a necessary evil; they take some of our liberty but should provide us with more security.
May I ask for a cite for the second sentence, please? Also, you are leaving out a very important class: artisans and small shop owners. They were hit hard by the depression. They were the backbone of the Nazi party.
Also, anti-semitism wasnt being fomented by the industrialists. It was in the professions and the universities. It was a ‘scientific’ anti-semitism fueled by the rising science of genetics and eugenics. Robert Lifton explains in well in Nazi Doctors.
Not when the party was starting out after World War I. It was considered a fringe organization that respectable people wouldn’t associate with. The middle class people like you describe didn’t support the Nazis until after the financial crises of the late twenties. Losing all their money made them desperate and willing to listen to extreme ideas.
If you’re looking for a good history of the early history of the Nazis, I’d recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans or Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris by Ian Kershaw. These writers go back to when the Nazis were just a small group with a couple hundred members and describe how Hitler was able to take over the organization and turn it into a vehicle for his own personal rise to power. And one thing he did was purge the radicals who wanted a revolution in Germany and were frightening mainstream Germans.