The 'Nazi' Economic Miracle.

reply to post by Freeborn


Ha! I couldnt eat one of those things even if I was drunk.

reply to post by Germanicus


For a bit of background to WW1, i would suggest you look at the Franco-Prussian war and the Entente Cordiale. Also worth looking at the German-UK arms race (dreadnought battleships). These topics will definitely give you a lot more info.

Whilst not strictly speaking anything to do with the Nazi economic miracle (a la thread), i am sure you will see why i have suggested looking at these areas. History is, frankly, fascinating and it is amazing what something can lead up to.

ETA:

I am with you on kebabs. Give me a curry and naan anyday!

reply to post by Flavian


Thanks droog. Hitler talks about how the Jews brought down Prussia in Mein Kampf but I was taking that with a grain of salt.

I will follow your lead.



I find Prussia pretty intriguing. I dont know much about it.

I know they helped Wellington beat Napolean. Not much else.

reply to post by Germanicus


So if national socialism is a good economic playbook , then where else has natioal socialism worked accept for Germany under hitler and still does ?

Originally posted by sapien82
reply to post by Germanicus

 

So if national socialism is a good economic playbook , then where else has natioal socialism worked accept for Germany under hitler and still does ?

edit on 12-4-2012 by sapien82 because: (no reason given)

Thats like saying communism doesnt work because look at what happened to Russia.
Its lazy.

National Socialism is a German invention as far as I know. And I dont thnk its been tried anywhere else.

But honestly,ATS is saturated with this argument if you can call it that. "Communism doesnt work because look at Russia" . It really isnt that simple and if we appraoched everything with this mindset we would all still be living in caves.

Hows capitalism looking right now? Pretty sick.

I think that one has to realize that nazism meant different things to different nazis.

In the early days, nazism, was the belief that Germany had been stabbed in the back by traitors within the country, Jews, representing a racially alien addition to German society that weakened it and that should be controlled and expunged. Stabbed in the back by profiteering foreigners/aliens/subhumans/men in black hats. It was a xenophobic movement of mythmakers, trying to create an archtype or pattern that real Germans could rally around in order to march as a people, out of the wilderness of military defeat/betrayal.

This was a salve to German war veterans and many of them were unemployed. They had rallied to fight together in war and now they rallied to carry on the fight in a peacetime of defeat and privation.

Nazism morphed into the belief that a militant political party, largely composed of war veterans, would look out for the interests of veterans and help them to get their share of economic wealth by overturning the established economic order in a thoroughly socialist, egalitarian manner. The Party began to pay its members, to publish its own newspaper and other publications and to build its own private army of ex-army "fighters".

Ernst Rohm and the Brownshirts made up the largest percentage of Party members during this phase. They were almost all ex-army people who had fought in WW1. They were social egalitarians who didn't like the monied classes and wanted to take what those people had, from them, by force.

These people were, after a time, brutally put down by Hitler and the SS leaders in the so-called Rohm Purge, and the Brownshirts were absorbed into other military groupings in Germany, but undoubtedly they are responsible for the establishment of a pattern of caring, within the Party, for ordinary workers. This pattern undoubtedly was a precursor to the enlightened attitude to labour, its compensation, working conditions, holidays etc., that prevailed under the Hitler dictatorship, conditions and attitudes that were advanced for their time, in the world.

The defining vector of the Party, had been set early, when Hitler had prevailed upon the very small group of Nazis who started the Party to accept him as leader and to accept that he would be dominant in setting the agenda for the party. Despite what the socialist minded, revolutionary Brownshirts might think, Hitler, the pragmatist was intent on gaining political power. The Munich Putsch had failed, so other means had to be found.

That meant political campaigning, which meant that the Party had to stress issues upon which most people could agree, such as the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty and the country's economic difficulties. Deals had to be made with the people who did hold power in the country, the Army and the economic oligarchs. The socialist radicals among the Brownshirts and the ideas they stood for had to go.

Nazism then became fascism, a symbiosis of State and Capital, like the fascism of Italy.

Nazism also became Hitlerism, the submission of a people to the absolute control of a mythologized leader. The "fuhrer principle" became the prevailing ethos within the Party.

This stage was reached in a very calculating manner. Hitler was himself the first Hitlerist. Allies along the way were dispensed with as soon as they became obstacles to his ideas of what the Party and the country needed to do.

In its final stages Nazism abandoned fascism and followed the mythologizing trend it had had from the beginning to the total destruction of capital in a gigantic national funeral pyre.

Nazism had in the end, revealed itself as no more than a self-destructive psychopathological condition.

But that is really what it was in the very beginning. It could have veered off at any time into more constructive pathways, but for that to happen, the leader would have had to have been removed.

Originally posted by Flavian
reply to post by SeekerofTruth101

 

You do realise it was a Brit that designed the jet engine do you?

Whittle designed A jet engine, not THE engine. There were (and are, of course) several different ways to reach the goal of "pushing" a plane through the air without rockets.
V. Ohain built the first complete plane with (another kind of) a jet engine. Source

I think they both command respect, but I feel uncertainty who "designed the jet engine". Just like the telephone - Bell was famed for it, but what about Reis, Gray and several other inventors?

So, does nationalism necessarily mean isolationism; and if so, is isolationism always bad?

Did the Reich before 1938 isolate itself economically?

A number of communist regimes have tried to do so, most notably North Korea under the Kims, with Sung's idea of "Jueche" which seems to mean make it all in Korea. That style of isolationism has cost Korea horribly, but I am not convinced that isolation of any kind always bad.

thoughts?