Weimar America: Four Major Ways We're Following In Germany's Fascist Footsteps

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/visions/156078/weimar_america%3A_four_major_ways_we%27re_following_in_germany%27s_fascist_footsteps/

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What happens when a nation that was once an economic powerhouse turns its back on democracy and on its middle class, as wealthy right-wingers wage austerity campaigns and enable extremist politics?

It may sound like America in 2012. But it was also Germany in 1932.

Most Americans have never heard of the Weimar Republic, Germany's democratic interlude between World War I and World War II. Those who have usually see it as a prologue to the horrors of Nazi Germany, an unstable transition between imperialism and fascism. In this view, Hitler's rise to power is treated as an inevitable outcome of the Great Depression, rather than the result of a decision by right-wing politicians to make him chancellor in early 1933.

Historians reject teleological approaches to studying the past. No outcome is inevitable, even if some are more likely than others. Rather than looking for predictable outcomes, we ought to be looking to the past to understand how systems operate, especially liberal capitalist democracies. In that sense, Weimar Germany holds many useful lessons for contemporary Americans. In particular, there are four major points of similarity between Weimar Germany and Weimar America worth examining.

1. Austerity. Today's German leaders preach the virtues of austerity. They justify their opposition to the inflationary, growth-creating policies that Europe desperately needs by pointing to the hyperinflation that occurred in 1923, and became one of the most enduring memories of the Weimar Republic. Yet the austerity policies enacted after the onset of the Depression produced the worst of Germany's economic crisis, while also destabilizing the country's politics. Cuts to wages, benefits and public programs dramatically worsened unemployment, hunger and suffering.

[fasttense]

1. An interesting comparison based on reason and logic.

Something you don't get a lot of today.

[KurtNYC]

2. I don't think it was RW politicians that helped Hitler to power but rather

businesses. Mussolini was first and they tried to replicate the "business owns government" model to Germany and the USA.

This article details how the plot against FDR played out in the US:

http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html

clip:

In 1933, Butler was approached by men representing a clique of multi-millionaire industrialists and bankers. They hated U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) with a passion, and saw his “New Deal” policies as the start of a communist take-over that threatened their interests. FDR even had the temerity to announce that the U.S. would stop using its military to interfere in Latin American affairs! Wall Street’s plutocrats were aghast! They had long been accustomed to wielding tremendous control over the government’s economic policies, including the use of U.S. forces to protect their precious foreign investments. Because of Butler’s steadfast military role in upholding U.S. business interests abroad, the plotters mistakenly thought they could recruit him to muster a “super-army” of veterans to use as pawns in their plan to subjugate or, if necessary, eliminate FDR.

[LiberalEsto]

3. Smedley Butler is one of our greatest heroes

He literally saved our democracy by refusing to serve the 1%

[KurtNYC]

8. Butler did good but I'm afraid the same people tried again

and now they are winning and cashing in.

[LiberalEsto]

9. Wasn't Prescott Bush one of them?

W.'s grandfather.

FDR could have prosecuted that crowd for treason, but instead he used the situation as leverage to get the New Deal programs passed. It was a tough choice -- help the desperate people in the U.S., or hang some of the culprits who caused the Depression, as a warning to others.

[KurtNYC]

10. Allegedly yes. Good documentary on it here (40 minutes) :

[yurbud]

11. I could see Sean Penn doing a movie about his life.

[zeemike]

4. Don't they have some kind of law that you can't make that comparison?

Even though it is so obviously true?
the Fascist lost the war but they did not go anywhere...just underground and waited to re create their evil under a new name ... but the game is the same.

[Gman]

5. Is Godwin's Law becoming obsolete?

[yurbud]

12. How old is that? I think it was obsolete as soon as Bush, Cheney, and Rove came on the scene

[FiveGoodMen]

13. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it -- Santayana

Godwin's law is an attempt to ensure that we can't remember the past by forbidding us to talk about it.

It is one of the most despicable ideas there is.

Fuck Godwin.

Fuck his followers.

[caseymoz]

6. Irony.

Just to say first, the Germans regard the Wiemar years from 1923-1933 as being a sort of cultural Golden Age. And they're probably right. I mean, you had Bertolt Brecht, you had avante garde theatre, you had Fritz Lang making films, you had artist such as George Grosz and Otto Dix in the Grotesque school of art along with Max Ernst in the Dada school, then you had the Bauhaus School of Design (later a great name for a band.) I mean, the country was just brimming with culture. And of course, in science you had Albert Einstein.

The cultural developments during the Wiemar Republic are still affecting us today.

Another more important irony, the hyperinflation. Conservatives have totally misstated what caused it and what the problem really was. Germany's industry got shut down by the French (I won't into how and what). German's didn't grow food then, they traded manufactured goods for it. So, when the factories shut down, and with Germany being a pariah state, Germans had no commodities in their stores to buy.

The problems wasn't too much money supply. The problem was currency with no goods available at all. As commodities became scarce, and prices rose, the government did print up more and more money. But still there was nothing to buy, and so what you could find was incredibly expensive.

They didn't make the money worthless by printing up to much. There was nothing in the shops. That was the problem. Money with nothing to buy becomes pretty worthless fast. And it couldn't have happened without the French. Just saying, it wasn't bad monetary policy that brought it on. And it's not comparable to anything going on in strapped economies today.

[Diclotican]

7. xchrom

xchrom

The building in the vicinity of Nuremberg, even after more than 70-80 year is mighty symbols of the nazi-germany parade ground - and is loaded with history - Here Hitler played his game, to make Germany the most mighty power in Europe and to plunge Germany out in a war who devastated most of Europe, and killed off more than 50 million civilians and military.. And destroyed Germany who had to be rebuild from more or less scratch...

And what Hitler did to germany - and most of Europe, was so devastating, that books about it is pouring up, more than 80 year after i all happened - and will possible go on, to be written about as long as it exist archives and people willing to write about it...

It is many reasons why germany in the years between the wars, ended up in the hand of Hitler.. Most of it is clearly because economical hardship - even in 1932, the year before Hitler finally got power, Dr Gobbles, the propaganda Minister in his diary - who for the most part survived the war, and give a mirror into the concept of nazism under Hitler. bluntly told that it looked bleak to take the power - legally as almost hopeless, as the bank was on the brink of going broke - the big bank rollers of the nazi-party, big industry and banks, was not willing to spend more money on NSDAP... It was mostly the ability to Hitler, to speak to the industry leaders, who turned that tide - and they was suddenly willing to bankroll NSDAP for the last time - even if Germany was on the brink of economical chaos - Germany of the early 1930s was a minefield of economical disasters - and the support of the Wiemar Republic, was on the lowest when Hitler got "elected" the german chancellor of Germany - the next year he managed to combine the idea of the German Presidents office - and the office of the chancler - and combined it to the office of Fuhrer... And he used the next 12 year, to build germany up to the biggest powers in Europe - dominating most of the continent - and then it all ended up in a horrible ruin, murdering of millions of totally innocent people who had not doing any crime.. Just because they was who they was...

But Germany and Europe learned how not to do it - at least to today.. When they do the same as they did then - slashing programs, specially for the poor and they who have not a voice.. Someone tend to talk to Ms Mercel about how the generation before her, was angry about the austerity who propelled Hitler into power - even though it had been possible to stop him in his tracks, up to mid 1932 at least... Everyone who had read Main Kampf, the "bible" of nazi ideology, understood that Hitler wanted to dominate and conquering Europe - not to make peace on even terms... But very few did read the book, and therefore Hitler could do as he wanted - all until 1939, when he was kind of crossing the Rubicon river - when he was starting the war against Poland... And therefore also started World War Two.. Our King Haakon the 7th was one of the few who have been told to had read the book from front to back - and the book was discovered a couple of years back in the royal library when they was renovating the building from top to bottom. And it had some interesting writing here and there, as the King had being reading the book...

The Wiemar Republic, and the interlope between the two Wars is maybe not good known by the people at large, even though it SHOULD be that...Hitlers success in the years between the wars should be touth in schools, in general History - as it is a school example why some manage to climb to power using the anger of the many, who feel they have been punished for something they had no reason to be punished for... (Aka the end of world war one, where germany got the fault for starting the war - and pay the other nations a big compensations for the war damages... Hitler was not willing to pay for it - and the great powers in Europe was just letting it goes by - and mostly because he was able to put "the working man" where he belong - under tight scrutiny from the government - powerless and without a voice in the matter of politics
AS the GOP of today want the "working man", or the commoners to be also in the US... Facism is facism, and the GOP of today, is dam close to facism, if they not even crossed into facism all togheter

Diclotican