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How Germany went from a Democracy to a Dictatorship in 6 months. Perfect reminder for what we face in 2024

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Nobody has ever presented any sort of evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that there is any truth to it. It is just something "funny" that they throw in because they don't like his opinions/politics. Usually good for a few likes.

Well, he doesn't need to worry, b/c if I have scrolled past it, I didn't notice it.
 
History will show that there is one similarity between Hitler
and Trump. They both took advantage of religious believers.

Hitler hijacked the state church of Lutheranism by saying that
their German founder Martin Luther hated Jews.

Trump hijacked the American Evangelical movement by saying
that he was a Christian. Of course Trump is a religious fraud
He conned Evangelical Clergy leaders to endorse him and knew
they would encourage their members to vote for him..
To be clear Martin Luther was definitely antisemitic. He published a work titled "on the Jews and their Lies". In which he describes Jews as ""base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth." They are full of the "devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine." He argued they shouldn't have legal
protections, that their schools and synagogues should be burned. He did say that he would allow conversion but if they did not convert they should be expelled.
 
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To be clear Martin Luther was definitely antisemitic. He published a work titled "on the Jews and their Lies". In which he describes Jews as ""base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth." They are full of the "devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine." He argued they shouldn't have legal
protections, that their schools and synagogues should be burned. He did say that he would allow conversion but if they did not convert they should be expelled.

Yes, but he was torn about the topic all his life.
 
This fellow, Homer J. Simpson, has been posting a day by day history of the Civil War, mainly from NYT, but sometimes other sources.

Very cool to see the contemporaneous (and often conflicting!) accounts in real time as battles you know were in the end pivotal are relayed to the newspaper audience 160 years ago.

I thought this thread could be something similar.

Hah!
 
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This fellow, Homer J. Simpson, has been posting a day by day history of the Civil War, mainly from NYT, but sometimes other sources.

Very cool to see the contemporaneous (and often conflicting!) accounts in real time as battles you know were in the end pivotal are relayed to the newspaper audience 160 years ago.

I thought this thread could be something similar.

Hah!
That is quite the rabbit hole. I don't think I can make the time commitment, but interesting nonetheless.
 
Yep. It all comes down to this.

If Trump wins in November then Democracy is over in America. He already tried to overthrow it once before. He won't fail this time.

I got news for ya my guy, democracy is already dead in America. When one party tries to remove their main political opponent and the favorite to win the election off the ballot, when they force rfk to run as an independent so he can't challenge the establishment, that's the definition of killing democracy. Your party is doing that, not Republicans, your party...
 
Perhaps my favorite bit of irony on this subject is that many of the same dumbasses who routinely compare MAGA to the Third Reich will lose their fvcking minds if anyone refers to Bernie or AOC as a socialist.
 
I got news for ya my guy, democracy is already dead in America. When one party tries to remove their main political opponent and the favorite to win the election off the ballot, when they force rfk to run as an independent so he can't challenge the establishment, that's the definition of killing democracy. Your party is doing that, not Republicans, your party...
The GOP attacked the Capitol. Projection and Stupidity 101.
 
Has there ever been a greater political boogeyman than this Nazi dictatorship bull?

Damn libs, you better start buying your lederhosen now before the fall rush.
 
Trump did more to enhance our civil liberties and freedoms than any president in recent history. The people who are calling Trump “Hitler” and screaming that their totalitarian methods and policies will preserve democracy are the real neoNatzis.

Read up on the German National Socialist Party and the fascists. You progressives do not have a clue what you are talking about. BTW, the Nazis called themselves “progressives” too. They thought eugenics was very progressive.
 
Trump did more to enhance our civil liberties and freedoms than any president in recent history. The people who are calling Trump “Hitler” and screaming that their totalitarian methods and policies will preserve democracy are the real neoNatzis.

Read up on the German National Socialist Party and the fascists. You progressives do not have a clue what you are talking about. BTW, the Nazis called themselves “progressives” too. They thought eugenics was very progressive.
 
Trump and his Republican enablers are the ones trying to capitalize on what the MAGA base believes has been wrongfully done to them. It’s what they want.

I agree with that comment, my dispute was with the usage of the Weimar Republic in a comparative analysis with what the US is currently facing. The Weimar Republic and the issues that the government faced have no commonality with the current day US government.
 
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These extreme comparisons/headlines just dilute whatever actual message you wanted to convey. People tune out, just like the other thread about 5million rape babies in Texas. You can make your point, and get more listeners without some weird extreme lead in.
 
Trump did more to enhance our civil liberties and freedoms than any president in recent history. The people who are calling Trump “Hitler” and screaming that their totalitarian methods and policies will preserve democracy are the real neoNatzis.

Read up on the German National Socialist Party and the fascists. You progressives do not have a clue what you are talking about. BTW, the Nazis called themselves “progressives” too. They thought eugenics was very progressive.
Can you give some examples of how Trump enhanced our civil liberties?

The Nazis did not embrace leftism or socialist ideals. They did not accept the class conflict concepts of Marxism. The first people Hitler came for were the communists . The first inhabitants of Dachau were German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.
 
I agree with that comment, my dispute was with the usage of the Weimar Republic in a comparative analysis with what the US is currently facing. The Weimar Republic and the issues that the government faced have no commonality with the current day US government.
Trump is old, not an effective operator, and doesn't have a coherent ideology to build behind. He is doing the same thing that he has always done which is just branding which he is good at but despite his rhetoric I am skeptical that he could ever accomplish anything that dramatic. Germans were shocked that they lost WWI suffered through a depression under stringent restrictions, they were primed to be galvanized behind a leader. I agree the conditions aren't similar.
 
Can you give some examples of how Trump enhanced our civil liberties?

The Nazis did not embrace leftism or socialist ideals. They did not accept the class conflict concepts of Marxism. The first people Hitler came for were the communists . The first inhabitants of Dachau were German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.

Trump got rid of many unnecessary and overreaching regulations which impose unnecessary costs, restrict our freedoms, and inhibit the free market. He also encouraged free speech and religious freedom. There were no new wars under his term which saved many lives- the ultimate civil liberty. Here are some of Trump’s accomplishments:
 
The Nazis did not embrace leftism or socialist ideals.
They did not accept the class conflict concepts of Marxism. The first people Hitler came for were the communists . The first inhabitants of Dachau were German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.
LOL

To compliment this the Reich Food Estate was established to regulate the conditions and production of the farmers. Its vast bureaucracy enforced regulations that touched all areas of the farmer's life and his food production, processing, and marketing. It was headed by Darre himself as "Reich Peasant Leader."

The Reich Food Estate had two goals: to jack up agricultural prices, and to make Germany "self-sufficient in food." Darre arbitrarily fixed the prices of agricultural products: within the first two years of the regime, wholesale prices rose 20 percent, and for cattle, vegetables, and dairy products, the rise was even steeper. But the farming sector was not exempt; the additional costs of these artificial prices were passed on to all consumers.

For its first year, the regime concentrated on a program of government grants of loan credit; stimulus bills for public works, such as road-building and forestation; and it "targeted tax cuts" to enterprises that increased capital expenditure and increased their number of employees. But from 1934 onward, the implementation of the Wehrwirtschaft, or war economy, became the model to which business and labor were subordinated and which was designed to function, not just in time of war, but in the period before war began.

The economy of total war was based on rearmament-the construction and maintenance of an enormous war machine to which all of society was subordinated. To do this the regime resorted to inflation. Hjalmar Schacht, the minister of economics, printed Reichmarks, and manipulated their official exchange value so that, at one time, they were estimated to have 237 different official values. He arranged barter deals with foreign governments and invented financial instruments that were issued by the central bank and "guaranteed" by the government, and that were kept "off-budget" to pay for rearmament. German banks were required to accept them, and they were discounted by the central bank. The minister of finance explained to Hitler that these were "merely a way of printing money."

In 1936, Göring's Four Year Plan was inaugurated. This made Göring, who was almost as ignorant about economics as Hitler, Germany's economic dictator. In the drive for a total war economy, protectionism was decreed and autarchy the desire-the so-called "Battle of Production." Consumer imports were nearly eliminated, price and wage controls were enacted, and vast state projects were built to manufacture raw materials.

The bureaucratization of the economy necessarily followed suit.
Walther Funk, who replaced Walther Schacht as minister of economics in 1937, admitted that "official communications now make up more than one half of a German Manufacturer's entire correspondence" and that "Germany's export trade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different forms must be filled out."

Businessmen and entrepreneurs were smothered by red tape, were told by the state what they could produce and how much and at what price, burdened by taxation, and were forced to make "special contributions" to the party. Corporations below a capitalization of $40,000 were dissolved and the founding of any below a capitalization of $2,000,000 was forbidden, which wiped out a fifth of all German businesses.

The cartelization of industry-which began before the Nazi regime-was made compulsory, and the Ministry of Economics was empowered to form new compulsory cartels or to force firms to join existing ones. The maze of business and trade associations created to lobby the Weimar Republic for various considerations in the law were nationalized and made compulsory for all businesses.

The Reich Economic Chamber was established on top of all these associations. It consisted of seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, seventy chambers of handicrafts, and one hundred chambers of industry and commerce. From these bureaucracies and the numerous offices and agencies of the Ministry of Economics and the Office of the Four Year Plan rained down a flood of decrees and laws, which in turn created for businesses the need on the one hand for lawyers and a legal department to understand these rules, and on the other, for a systematic regime of bribing officials.

Then, in February 1935 all employment came under the exclusive control of government employment offices which determined who would work where and for how much. And on June 22, 1938, the Office of the Four Year Plan instituted guaranteed employment by conscripting labor. Every German worker was assigned a position from which he could not be released by the employer, nor could he switch jobs, without permission of the government employment office. Worker absenteeism was met with fines or imprisonment-all in the name of job security. A popular Nazi slogan at the time was "the Common Interest before Self"!

And in his foreword to the 1936 German language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire."
 
The Nazis did not embrace leftism or socialist ideals. They did not accept the class conflict concepts of Marxism. The first people Hitler came for were the communists . The first inhabitants of Dachau were German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.
LOL

IG Farben was a clear example of the reorganization of industry the Nazis undertook for their benefit. Sybille Steinbacher, a professor of Holocaust studies, wrote about the public-private partnership in her book Auschwitz, stating:

Otto Ambros and IG Farben director Fritz ter Meer held a board meeting in Berlin with Carl Krauch who was not only a member of the board of directors of IG Farben, but also a member of the circle of industrialists around Reichsfurhrer-SS known as Himmler’s “Circle of Friends.”
After the Nazis took power, this kind of cooperation was common. Private businesses became merely public entities, and industrialists who resisted the Nazi commissars and their policies were removed from their positions and their businesses seized.

Junkers airplane factory did not fare much better, according to Temin, who wrote:

Prof. Junkers of the Junkers airplane factory refused to follow the government’s bidding in 1934. The Nazis thereupon took over the plant, compensating Junkers for his loss. This was the context in which other contracts were negotiated.
This Nazi war on business left industrialists and other businessmen worried that they would have their livelihoods stolen from them, as Günter Reimann explains in The Vampire Economy.

Reimann quotes a letter from a German businessman to an American businessman:

The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that officially we are still independent businessmen.
The letter continues:

Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
This German businessman also complained of “arbitrary government decisions concerning quantity, quality, and prices of foreign raw materials.” But businessmen were not the only members of the private sector who faced mass amounts of bureaucracy and control. The farmers faced it as well.
 
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The Nazis did not embrace leftism or socialist ideals. They did not accept the class conflict concepts of Marxism. The first people Hitler came for were the communists . The first inhabitants of Dachau were German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.

LOL

I mentioned Mises’s vital distinction between two kinds of socialism. In one of them, the state owns the means of production. In the other, private property still exists but the state tells the owners what to do. This is a form of central planning and still counts as socialism, and it was this that the Nazis put into practice.

Sehon says that this isn’t an accurate account of the Nazi economy and cites an article by Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner to support his claim that private business enjoyed considerable autonomy in the Third Reich. Thanks to Mr. Paul McElroy, I now have access to the article.

Before I discuss this article, I need to mention another of Mises’s vital insights. As readers will remember, Mises in his famous socialist calculation argument proved that a fully socialist economy would collapse into chaos. If this is right, how can ostensibly socialist economies such as Soviet Russia exist? In answer, Mises said that these economies weren’t fully socialist. They allowed scope for private enterprise, albeit of a limited sort. Mises’s point applies to the German form of socialism as well as the Russian.

Thus, Buchheim and Scherner’s argument, even if we accept it, doesn’t disprove Mises’s claim that the Nazi economy was a form of socialism. Nazi control of business wasn’t complete, but neither was the Soviet economy totally socialist.

But should we accept Buchheim and Scherner’s argument? No, we shouldn’t. It is a response to a number of economic historians who accept an analysis of the Nazi economy like that of Mises. In particular, these authors criticize the famous MIT economist Peter Temin’s article “Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930s,” available here by scrolling down.

In my opinion, Temin has the better of the argument. Buchheim and Scherner acknowledge:

The Nazi regime did not have any scruples to apply force and terror, if that was judged useful to attain its aims. And in economic policy it did not abstain from numerous regulations and interventions in markets, in order to further rearmament and autarky as far as possible. Thus the regime, by promulgating Schacht’s so-called “New Plan” in 1934, very much strengthened its influence on foreign exchange as well as on raw materials’ allocation, in order to enforce state priorities. Wage-setting became a task of public officials, the capital market was reserved for state demand, a general price stop decreed in 1936. In addition state demand expanded without precedent. Between 1932 and 1938 it increased with an average annual rate of 26 per cent; its share in GNP exploded in these years from 13.6 to 30.5 percent. As a consequence private consumption as well as exports were largely crowded out.
But, they say, this isn’t the whole story:

1. Despite widespread rationing of inputs firms normally still had ample scope to follow their own production plans. 2. Investment decisions in industry were influenced by state regulation, but the initiative generally remained with the enterprises. There was no central planning of the level or the composition of investment. 3. Even with respect to its own war-related investment projects the state normally did not use power in order to secure unconditional support of industry. Rather, freedom of contract was respected. But the state tried to induce firms to engage according to its plans by offering them a whole bundle of contract options to choose from.
I think that their caveats, when read in the light of Mises’s point that a socialist economy needs to allow scope for private enterprise, leave Mises’s account of the Nazi economy intact. In this connection, an incident that Temin mentions is telling:

Terror was still a potent reality for I.G. Farben in 1939, at the probable zenith of its influence. The head of one the firm’s three divisions (Sparten) was alleged to have said to a visiting group of party officials that Hitler and Göring ‘were not sufficiently expert to be able to judge something like this…’.The Farben executive was denounced to the Gestapo, and threatened with a trial and possible prison sentence….He was subject to lengthy interrogation at the Gestapo office and had to petition the local Nazi Kreisleiter for permission to call on him and apologize. The Nazi Gauleiter reprimanded him and said that he could not protect him again from more serious consequences.
Sehon also takes it as an argument that the Nazis weren’t socialists that they suppressed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties and sent many of their members to concentration camps. I suggest that he look up what Stalin did to Mensheviks and dissident Bolsheviks. Socialists often kill their own, a point Sehon would do well to remember.
 
LOL

IG Farben was a clear example of the reorganization of industry the Nazis undertook for their benefit. Sybille Steinbacher, a professor of Holocaust studies, wrote about the public-private partnership in her book Auschwitz, stating:


After the Nazis took power, this kind of cooperation was common. Private businesses became merely public entities, and industrialists who resisted the Nazi commissars and their policies were removed from their positions and their businesses seized.

Junkers airplane factory did not fare much better, according to Temin, who wrote:


This Nazi war on business left industrialists and other businessmen worried that they would have their livelihoods stolen from them, as Günter Reimann explains in The Vampire Economy.

Reimann quotes a letter from a German businessman to an American businessman:


The letter continues:


This German businessman also complained of “arbitrary government decisions concerning quantity, quality, and prices of foreign raw materials.” But businessmen were not the only members of the private sector who faced mass amounts of bureaucracy and control. The farmers faced it as well.
Yes it was a totalitarian regime. Nazis did not embrace Marxism or Capitalism. The state is the point every person, industry, company is dedicated to expanding the states interests. There is no effort to balance the classes. The foundation of Nazism is literally the superiority of certain individuals based on their genetics.
 
LOL

To compliment this the Reich Food Estate was established to regulate the conditions and production of the farmers. Its vast bureaucracy enforced regulations that touched all areas of the farmer's life and his food production, processing, and marketing. It was headed by Darre himself as "Reich Peasant Leader."

The Reich Food Estate had two goals: to jack up agricultural prices, and to make Germany "self-sufficient in food." Darre arbitrarily fixed the prices of agricultural products: within the first two years of the regime, wholesale prices rose 20 percent, and for cattle, vegetables, and dairy products, the rise was even steeper. But the farming sector was not exempt; the additional costs of these artificial prices were passed on to all consumers.

For its first year, the regime concentrated on a program of government grants of loan credit; stimulus bills for public works, such as road-building and forestation; and it "targeted tax cuts" to enterprises that increased capital expenditure and increased their number of employees. But from 1934 onward, the implementation of the Wehrwirtschaft, or war economy, became the model to which business and labor were subordinated and which was designed to function, not just in time of war, but in the period before war began.

The economy of total war was based on rearmament-the construction and maintenance of an enormous war machine to which all of society was subordinated. To do this the regime resorted to inflation. Hjalmar Schacht, the minister of economics, printed Reichmarks, and manipulated their official exchange value so that, at one time, they were estimated to have 237 different official values. He arranged barter deals with foreign governments and invented financial instruments that were issued by the central bank and "guaranteed" by the government, and that were kept "off-budget" to pay for rearmament. German banks were required to accept them, and they were discounted by the central bank. The minister of finance explained to Hitler that these were "merely a way of printing money."

In 1936, Göring's Four Year Plan was inaugurated. This made Göring, who was almost as ignorant about economics as Hitler, Germany's economic dictator. In the drive for a total war economy, protectionism was decreed and autarchy the desire-the so-called "Battle of Production." Consumer imports were nearly eliminated, price and wage controls were enacted, and vast state projects were built to manufacture raw materials.

The bureaucratization of the economy necessarily followed suit.
Walther Funk, who replaced Walther Schacht as minister of economics in 1937, admitted that "official communications now make up more than one half of a German Manufacturer's entire correspondence" and that "Germany's export trade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different forms must be filled out."

Businessmen and entrepreneurs were smothered by red tape, were told by the state what they could produce and how much and at what price, burdened by taxation, and were forced to make "special contributions" to the party. Corporations below a capitalization of $40,000 were dissolved and the founding of any below a capitalization of $2,000,000 was forbidden, which wiped out a fifth of all German businesses.

The cartelization of industry-which began before the Nazi regime-was made compulsory, and the Ministry of Economics was empowered to form new compulsory cartels or to force firms to join existing ones. The maze of business and trade associations created to lobby the Weimar Republic for various considerations in the law were nationalized and made compulsory for all businesses.

The Reich Economic Chamber was established on top of all these associations. It consisted of seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, seventy chambers of handicrafts, and one hundred chambers of industry and commerce. From these bureaucracies and the numerous offices and agencies of the Ministry of Economics and the Office of the Four Year Plan rained down a flood of decrees and laws, which in turn created for businesses the need on the one hand for lawyers and a legal department to understand these rules, and on the other, for a systematic regime of bribing officials.

Then, in February 1935 all employment came under the exclusive control of government employment offices which determined who would work where and for how much. And on June 22, 1938, the Office of the Four Year Plan instituted guaranteed employment by conscripting labor. Every German worker was assigned a position from which he could not be released by the employer, nor could he switch jobs, without permission of the government employment office. Worker absenteeism was met with fines or imprisonment-all in the name of job security. A popular Nazi slogan at the time was "the Common Interest before Self"!

And in his foreword to the 1936 German language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire."
Much of which the Biden administration is doing.
 
LOL

I mentioned Mises’s vital distinction between two kinds of socialism. In one of them, the state owns the means of production. In the other, private property still exists but the state tells the owners what to do. This is a form of central planning and still counts as socialism, and it was this that the Nazis put into practice.

Sehon says that this isn’t an accurate account of the Nazi economy and cites an article by Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner to support his claim that private business enjoyed considerable autonomy in the Third Reich. Thanks to Mr. Paul McElroy, I now have access to the article.

Before I discuss this article, I need to mention another of Mises’s vital insights. As readers will remember, Mises in his famous socialist calculation argument proved that a fully socialist economy would collapse into chaos. If this is right, how can ostensibly socialist economies such as Soviet Russia exist? In answer, Mises said that these economies weren’t fully socialist. They allowed scope for private enterprise, albeit of a limited sort. Mises’s point applies to the German form of socialism as well as the Russian.

Thus, Buchheim and Scherner’s argument, even if we accept it, doesn’t disprove Mises’s claim that the Nazi economy was a form of socialism. Nazi control of business wasn’t complete, but neither was the Soviet economy totally socialist.

But should we accept Buchheim and Scherner’s argument? No, we shouldn’t. It is a response to a number of economic historians who accept an analysis of the Nazi economy like that of Mises. In particular, these authors criticize the famous MIT economist Peter Temin’s article “Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930s,” available here by scrolling down.

In my opinion, Temin has the better of the argument. Buchheim and Scherner acknowledge:


But, they say, this isn’t the whole story:


I think that their caveats, when read in the light of Mises’s point that a socialist economy needs to allow scope for private enterprise, leave Mises’s account of the Nazi economy intact. In this connection, an incident that Temin mentions is telling:


Sehon also takes it as an argument that the Nazis weren’t socialists that they suppressed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties and sent many of their members to concentration camps. I suggest that he look up what Stalin did to Mensheviks and dissident Bolsheviks. Socialists often kill their own, a point Sehon would do well to remember.
Can you provide references? You are copying and pasting without attribution. Never mind I found the source.

This is an article from David Gordon from the libertarian think tank Mises.

https://mises.org/library/yes-nazis-were-socialists-0
 
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To be clear Martin Luther was definitely antisemitic. He published a work titled "on the Jews and their Lies". In which he describes Jews as ""base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth." They are full of the "devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine." He argued they shouldn't have legal
protections, that their schools and synagogues should be burned. He did say that he would allow conversion but if they did not convert they should be expelled.
Sounds like a dirty Mooslem.
 
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