re: History Discussion Thread

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Hitler's whole thing was a fanatical belief that Jews and leftists back in Berlin conspired to betray the German military and subject Germany to the humiliation of Versailles.

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Those seem more like winks and nudges from him. He was a political thermometer for his hateful malcontents. Not that he didn’t also pursue those ends of course, I just tend to think he was more of an opportunist shitheel than a true believer in the Aryan cause before the drugs took hold.

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hadn’t the discrimination against the Jews and others been building since the late 1800’s after the depression?

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I think Weimar was a pretty big reset for most of the country. They probably felt like they were living in clown world.

If you take a historically conservative country and swing it way left, dont be surprised when it swings back way right. Hitler comes into power not by claiming radical new change, but by claiming a restoration of old germany.

The USSR was doomed to failure because the system it based itself on simply could not compete with capitalist economies in terms of efficient control of the means of production. Marx made a lot of assumptions in describing the inexorable historical march to full communism, and one of them - perhaps the most indefensible one of all, in retrospect - was that industrialization must lead inevitably to communism, which is a more rational and efficient ordering of an industrial society than the capitalist system that allows industrialization in the first place. This assumption led him to further assume that the transition to communism in one country would necessarily lead to the same transition occurring in neighboring countries. This was one of the driving motivations of the Bolsheviks, who believed that although Russia in 1917 was far behind the Western European countries in industrial capacity, a successful communist revolution there would be the first domino that would ultimately lead to similar revolutions in Germany, France, and Great Britain. This obviously did not happen, as conservative elements in both Poland and Germany defeated Communist attempts to export the revolution to those countries. This forced the Bolsheviks to reconsider their own aims, leading to the introduction of Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" policy, which aimed to rapidly industrialize the fledgling USSR in order to compete against a Western Europe that would clearly not be joining the worldwide communist revolution anytime soon. But this policy would have been exceedingly unlikely to succeed and the Bolsheviks might well have been overthrown themselves had they not been saved by the same thing that saved Hitler and the Nazis from obscurity: the Great Depression. Up to that point Western companies had been extremely reticent to do business with the Soviets for the very obvious reason that their entire economic system was based on seizing control of private enterprise, but after the economic collapse dried up orders from their own countries, taking a risk on Soviet orders seemed preferable to simply shuttering their factories due to lack of work. The result was a rapid expansion of Soviet industry on a scale that allowed the USSR to compete with and in some cases exceed the production capacity of their capitalist rivals (although the "quantity over quality" mindset that was required to achieve this rapid expansion was something the Soviets never managed to shake). Communist economic principles still operated to hold the Soviet economy back, though, as some industries (particularly those with ties to the military and, eventually, aerospace) received strong government support and were able to keep pace with the West, while others (particularly consumer goods) were neglected and allowed to lag behind with a resultant lag in the standard of living, which is ultimately what led to the downfall of the Soviet state.

I can't decide if I am flattered or offended by that question.

I have also made Alexa apologize to me and admit she was wrong during a drunken argument with her.

That's all I got.

Good stuff guys.

There may have been limited Western investment in the USSR prior to the Depression, but I don't believe it would have ever risen to the level that it did without a global economic collapse spurring an additional influx of money. The risk was simply too great that a Russian venture would either fail outright or that it would succeed and then be nationalized by the Soviet government for there to be a high level of interest in putting capital into the USSR when it could be far more safely invested in any capitalist country. It was only after the Depression, when the choice became either risky Soviet business or no business at all, that Western firms became willing to foot the bill for Russian industrialization. You're right that all that investment couldn't build a functioning economy from scratch, though, and about the human cost of building a military industrial complex overnight from nothing. But human cost was meaningless to the Bolsheviks, and a functioning economy was never truly their aim because in spite of their supposed erudition, they were clueless about how actual economics worked.

I don't know that I'd say that German unification led inevitably to Hitler and the Nazis. It took a very specific set of events to put that group into power. I think it would be more accurate to say that German unification led inevitably to the First World War. That war then served as the catalyst for everything that came after because of the specific way that it played out. WW1 to me is a much more interesting what-if point than WW2 is. Germany was going to lose the Second World War no matter what they did, but the First could have ended in a German victory if things had gone differently.

I don't necessarily disagree with that statement, but with the contention that German unification was going to inevitably lead to the Nazis. There were multiple directions that Germany could have gone post-unification. I do think that some version of the First World War was unavoidable, but there are many ways that that conflict could have played out and all of them result in a different postwar world and a different Germany. What if Germany had pursued an alliance with Russia rather than with Austria-Hungary? What if Wilhelm had not soured relations with the British with his ridiculous desire to have a navy that could rival the Royal Navy? What if the Germans had won the Battle of the Marne? All of these probably result in a German victory in WW1, with defeated and humiliated France most likely becoming the breeding ground for nationalist revanchist fascism in the postwar world.