Centralized planning is a bad idea overall but it’s not a complete failure. For argument’s sake, let’s say centrally planned economies run from 0 to 7 and free market economies run from 3 to 10. A top notch centrally planned economy in the 6-7 range would outperform a terrible free market economy in the 3-4 range. The centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union outperformed the mixed economy of Nazi Germany during WWII.
I think that’s a false explanation. 1950s were as ‘conformist’ as much as any other period in history. 1950s came to be called conformist because there was suddenly a new generation that didn’t like the 50s. Likewise, the civil rights movement didn’t create hippies. The liberal, left-wing sentiments that created hippies created civil rights.
What created hippies was not a cultural mechanism, but an instinctual. Whenever people are happy and fortunate, they become left-wing. When they are worried and full of remorse, they turn right-wing. E.g., what explains the difference between red states and blue states? Blue states have thriving tech-fueled economies, red states are stagnating, especially in comparison to blues.
Don’t forget that hippies weren’t the repressed kids of strict conformists. They were the privilidged children of the middle/upper-middle class. It’s ironic that they came to denounce the system that gave them their carefree childhoods, but it makes sense if you think of it as human nature.
P.S. primates and many other animals change their behavior, instincts, and emotions depending on overall conditions. It’s almost common sense.
In Harris’ Fatherland, such “counterculture” as there is is extremely furtive and mild. In one scene, as Hitler’s birthday celebration approaches, some police are scrubbing a grafitto off a marble wall in central Berlin: “Anyone not having a good time will be arrested!” And some kids listen to the Beatles – as unobtrusively as possible. This is still a society where the Gestapo has the entirely legal authority to abduct and kill anyone secretly, without trial or charges.
Of course there were, so long as the Russians were defeated, disarmed and disorganized, and the Germans had more bullets than there were Russians. They would simply send killing-squads to each village, one after another, and issue a decree that any non-German spotted on “pacified” territory should be shot on sight. Partisans and refugees hiding in the woods would find themselves doomed, in the long run, if they could rely on no support from local civilians because German settlers were the only such remaining. Making a subject people submit and work and obey is complicated. Killing them is simple.
First, I’d like to know if “rich men all over the world” really tended to sympathize with the Nazi economic system. If this is true, I’d really like to know why. Who exactly was “rich” in Nazi Germany? I was under the impression that it was for all intents and purposes a socialist system, and that Nazi leadership were the only rich people in Germany.
Well, you know, in real life they weren’t able to do this. Why do you suppose they would have been able to do it had they managed to take Moscow and ‘defeat’ the Soviets? How would they disarm the population…especially if they were wacking large numbers of them? Why would they remain disorganized indefinitely in the face of that kind of policy?
And the Germans only had more bullets than there were Russians if the Russians lined up to be wacked nice and neat. In real life of course they wouldn’t. Hell, even if the Germans did the smart thing and managed to win over a large portion of the Russian population (something they COULD have done, but didn’t actually do in that pesky real life thing), they STILL would have had problems with revolts by the displaced communists.
And this was just in Russia. Without a massive buy in by the local populations their empire would have imploded long before it economically collapsed. Your assertion that they would simply kill a lot of people just doesn’t work in real life…because by and large majority populations don’t willingly and meekly walk to the slaughter.
Even if the population would just wait patiently for the Germans to get around to wacking them, even if there was no communications between villages to warn of impending wackage ( :dubious: ), there weren’t enough Germans in the world to go to every village, town and city to do this…even if we are talking about just in Russia and not in the wider world. Your assertion is unrealistic…not least because the Russians wouldn’t have been sitting on their butts waiting for the Germans to wander in and shoot them. In real life they fought back as partisan groups and made the Germans life hell. Why do you suppose this would stop?
Not on the scales we are talking about. Do you have any idea how many Russians there were? Stalin had the all time record for wacking folks and IIRC he only managed to kill 40-50 million over the course of decades of trying…and in pretty much complete control of a more or less willing population (i.e. he had a buy in for the majority of Russians). Seriously…your speculations bear no relation to reality on this.
-XT
The Nazis were never really socialists. They just put it in their party’s name because socialism was a popular idea with voters back in the twenties and thirties. Hitler and the Nazis cut deals early on with German business interests - the Nazis would keep the factory workers in line and the factory owners would support the Nazi party.
There has never been a time in German history when the gap between the rich and the poor grew more than during the Third Reich. At least economically those were very good times for German industrialists.
I can’t agree with you on this. The Soviets held out because they were still being supported from the rear, and still had an organized chain of command. Had the Germans managed to break that, they could have scattered the population and slaughtered them had they chose to.
There are plenty of examples of this kind of genocide in history. Once the coordinated fighting capability of one side breaks down, it’s at mercy of the other.
Now, if you’d said the Soviet people couldn’t be conquered and pacified, that’s another matter. But slaughtered outright? I don’t see why not.
The same can be said of communist Russia though, right? There were plenty of superrich people in Russia, but they were all high ranking party leadership (which I assume was the same in Nazi Germany). Nobody is claiming that the rich tended to sympathize with communists, though.
XT, I also have to disagree with your last post. The Nazis demonstrated that they weren’t just talking about eliminating populations they didn’t like - they were seriously planning to do it. They set up and carried out a program to kill over twelve million people. Once you’ve killed that many people, killing off a hundred million or two hundred million is just an expansion of an existing program. It might have taken the Nazis fifty years or so but they probably would have killed off all of the targetted people in whatever area they controlled.
They were no “superrich” people in the Soviet Union. High ranking government officials certainly had more privileges then the average Soviet citizen but the property they owned would be more comparable to successful American banker or lawyer not to a billionaire.
Do you have a cite for this?
No, it started as a socialist party. Your points about Hitler’s moves are correct, but even then there was a very influential wing of the party wondering when the socialist stuff was going to start. After the Rohm purge, that wing of the party was suddenly of no influence any more.
I think Germany would have collapsed with hyperinflation. The Nazis paid for the war by issuing bonds, which the people HAD to buy. Meanwhile, consumption was kept down because everthing was rationed. Despite their efficiency, the nazi war economy was mismanaged, and only the theft of materiel from conquered nations kept the show going.
It vill vork, or ve have vays ov making it vork. Either dat, or ve vill shoot voo!
That wing was (and is now, among neo-Nazis) known as Strasserism.
Even back in the very beginning, before Hitler joined and Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer were still running the party, the socialism was mostly a front. Bavarian businessmen slipped Nazi leaders money so they’d talk more about Jews and foreigners rather than strikes and unions. The socialists were in the party but they weren’t allowed to set the agenda. The businessmen figured they could use the Nazi party to control the workers. But after Hitler took over, he figured he could use the Nazi party to control the workers and the businessmen.
Well, no, they were National Socialists, which makes sense if you’re a Nazi. National Socialism is all about the survival of the race; it’s collectivist in a sense, since it emphasizes race-survival, which is an inherently collective effort. However, it rejects the underlying class-based view of communism, which is by definition not restricted to a particular race.
Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist in the sense we generally mean those terms today; it’s a fallacy of the false dillemma to try to categorize Nazis along that particular one-dimensional continuum. Hitler and his followers despised both Communism and capitalism as it existed in 1932 because both were obstacles to the central purpose of Nazism; survival and supremacy of the German race.
The fact that the Nazis received support from businessmen is simply a product of circumstance - at the time, a fascist party looked like a better option than a communist party, and anyway big businesses giving money to powerful politicians has been a common protection racket pretty much since the invention of civilization. There’s nothing about Nazism that was particularly protective of big business in general or any big business in particular, or that put any stock (ha!) into protecting private ownership or commerce rights. Such things could be, and were, put aside whenever it was convenient to the Nazis to do so.
Orwell was speaking of Fascism in general, and had some grounds for his perception. Also from “The Lion and the Unicorn”:
It is well known, by the way, that Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer, at least until Hitler went to war with the U.S. (To be fair, he did not fully understand the nature of Nazism. At age 80, shown a film about the concentration camps, he reportedly had a heard attack.)