Pat Buchanan wrote a book contemplating alternatives to war with the Nazis and one implication of his alternative history is the Nazis never would have existed. A more sensible policy toward Germany after the Great War would have short circuited the process that created the Nazis. His other assertion is that even if Hitler came to power, his ambitions would not have been magnified by the humiliation resulting from the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis would have been different.
In one of Dan Carlin’s podcasts, he speculated a bit about what would have happened if the Nazis had survived World War II and continued to rule Germany. Instead of war, the British had struck a deal with the Germans so they could have a country for all German people, but not dominating the continent militarily. The result being something similar to modern Germany, in terms of territory, but run by the Nazis. The point of his thought experiment was to imagine how Nazism would evolve as a peacetime ruling ideology.
Usually, these sorts of thought experiments just assume the Nazis would have remained the evil Hollywood version we have all been trained to imagine. The rest of the fantasy has them doing awful things to all of the usual suspects. In reality, the Nazis evolved into what they were partially in response to war. Germany was turned into a munitions factory in order to wage war and that altered the party. A party ruling a normal nation, at peace with its neighbors, would have been a different party.
One outcome of the Buchanan scenario of a Germany at peace, but ruled by the Nazis is there would not have been a Holocaust. That sounds counter-intuitive, but the choice of mass murder was not the first option for the Nazis, when dealing with unwanted minority populations. War made it the default option. In a peaceful world, the most likely scenario would have been the traditional one, where Jews, gypsies, slavs and anyone else deemed undesirable would have been exiled.
Another probable outcome is Hitler would have been deposed at some point after peace with the rest of Europe. His personal style was appealing in the economic and political crisis of pre-war Germany and tolerable in the crisis of war. Megalomaniacs tend not to do well in stable periods. Eventually, the various classes and interests of German society would have decided they could do better than Hitler. That and the leadership of the party was full of ambitious and aggressive men.
That means the most likely outcome of peace would have been turmoil in the party and a series of purges like under Stalin. Germans are not Russians, so a period of turmoil would most likely have resulted in a some sort of stable ruling committee at the top of the party. The unbalanced lunatics and sadists would have been purged in favor of the more practical. There were a lot of Albert Speer types in the junior ranks, who knew how to run a proper society.
There are a lot of assumptions there, but that’s the nature of alternative history. If things were different, they would not be the same. Assuming the Nazis could have negotiated peace to a willing Europe and managed to get through the decade or so of intra-party squabbles to emerge as a stable ruling elite, what would the “new” Germany have evolved into as a society? It’s not something anyone thinks much about as it does not further the narrative. The Nazis are evil. The end.
Probably, the Great War veterans that founded the party would have been pushed aside, in favor of the inter-war generation from upper-class families who joined the party in the 1930’s. A guy like Albert Speer was able to rise quickly because he was smart, well-educated and cultured. That means the party would have become less militaristic and more corporate. That also means German society would have evolved away from a martial order to something like a modern America.
Economically, the Nazis were ad hoc socialists, in that they embraced command economics as a practical solution to present problems. Ideologically, they had no economic plan. Again, Albert Speer provides insight into what the post-peace Nazi party would have done. Companies like Mercedes, Siemens, Krupp, BASF, Deutsche Bank and others that profited doing business with the Nazis during the war, would have emerged as the dominant companies under peacetime Germany.
It would have been the sort of corporatism we see emerging in America, where private firms get narrow monopolies and in exchange for enforcing the cultural norms desired by the ruling elite. Corporations are not supporters of civil liberties and they certainly don’t like market competition. Wherever big business prevails, freedom declines and markets collapse. Instead of being turned into a massive munitions facility, the peaceful Nazi Germans would have been turned into a national corporate conglomerate.
The point of this sort of speculation is not to better understand the past, but to better understand the present. The first half of the 20th century in Europe was the result of a great economic paradigm shift. Europe had moved from an agrarian, trading society to an industrial and urban one. The result was the great concentration of wealth and the rise of corporatism. It was not just in Germany. The Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and even Americans saw a lot of merit in fascism.
When looked at from the current age, where global corporations are enthusiastically enforcing moral codes and partnering with the state to impose an order that benefits the managerial class, it suggests corporatism is inevitable or a default arrangement. The democratic state prefers dealing with a few dominant actors, so popular government encourages the concentration of capital. Eventually, those concentrations of wealth become rival power centers and then they join the state as partners in power.
Interestingly, what the Nazis imagined for Europe, where Germany sat atop a unified continent, is pretty much what the EU is today. What we have come to call globalism is taking the same concept and scaling it up to include all of the modern economies. A guy like Albert Speer, if he were alive today, would recognize what was evolving. It also means that the balance to this would be some sort of organized labor component, that includes everyone outside the managerial class. The third leg of the stool, so to speak.
“Then there is this tidbit later in the column. Williamson writes “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.” No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.”
What’s the point of this paragraph? That he didn’t attribute it? The alleged source (messenger) is an “evil” person? Or do you dislike the meme itself? Do you think it is inaccurate?
Zman is jaded by US upbringing. German/Nazi internicine fIghting would continue in times of relative peace just as it did between WWI and WWII. (Night of the Long Knives.) Nothing would bring an end to this essentially Euro type of national intrigue.
What did somewhat pacify this situation temporarily was utter urban destruction followed by US occupation after WWII. Several insurrections were put down in eastern and western sectors. The most stable period ensued until the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Germany and Europe are now gradually devolving to the pre WWII state and enduring various mass migrations.
Otherwise Germany was a reflection of wider Europe. The Germans French Spanish Italians Austrians Dutch Flemish Swedish Hungarian Romanian …. British people were continuously at war with each other (and let’s not bring the Catholic Protestant Orthodox overlay into this.)
Only post WWII US occupation somewhat stabilized Europe and perhaps that’s why US troops remain there today. The various factions in Germany and Europe have deep seated historic/genetic hatred for each other and this would only continue to flourish under any Nazi political regime. This is the nature of Germany and Europe.
The corporatized NAZIS would have stopped all explicit euthanasia operations, but would have achieved the same end by working slaves to death and denying them medical care.
Instead, they were trying to deport them.
Had they kept them, kept quiet about slave factories, and bought off hostilities (made treaties) keeping only their 1938 gains, they might’ve been as celebrated by the Left as the Soviets or Cuba.
Would the Left then have taken a different direction as well?
“The point of his thought experiment was to imagine how Nazism would evolve as a peacetime ruling ideology.”
Science Fiction tend to lean towards something similar to what happened to the Soviets happening – a post-Hitler era flows eventually into the equivalent of a Brezhnev stagnation. That usually ignores the idea that Germany would have probably been much more economically dynamic than the Soviets but the idea that an authoritarian state would end up freezing itself ideologically and that this would have some much broader, negative effect isn’t far-fetched. A more modern view since we are in a post-Soviet era would be for Germany in these circumstances to have more of a resemblance to Red China.
“Again, Albert Speer provides some insight into what the post-peace Nazi party would have done.”
That’s assuming that Hitler doesn’t pull a Mao and start up a cultural revolution to keep himself both relevant and from being sidelined or killed in his sleep by more conciliatory elements.
“There are a lot of assumptions there, but that’s the nature of alternative history. If things were different, they would not be the same.”
What would the Nazis look like in a much longer run would have depended on the circumstances that allowed them to survive that long. What kind of peace in Europe creates the circumstances for them to stay in power is the key to the type of scenario you want to follow. Generally though, they’d have to either avoid WW2 or have it turn into a short war for them to keep going.
I don’t particularly see a peaceful scenario though; the only way for the Nazis to have held on in Germany long term would have been if they had stopped expanding; they mostly accomplished their goals in pre-1938 German territory but were too ideologically motivated to grab for territory everywhere else. One thing leads to another until you have a breaking point – the other powers weren’t going to be able to give in indefinitely and the Germans weren’t going to get all the German populated territories they wanted. Even if Britain and France had sold Poland together with the Czechs, there’d still be the matter of Alsace Lorraine sooner or later. Britain and France weren’t about to just give up world-power status quietly.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine a post-war settlement in 1945 leaving men like Albert Speer in authority. Or Goring, who was still around when the trials began.
We used to laugh at expressions bubbling up in the Obama years, when John Kerry talked about negotiating with the “moderate Taliban”.
Well, why not “moderate Nazis”?
As a kid, the Irish Republican Army meant to me hand-grenades in baby carriages, families blown apart in London department stores; but now, they’re just “part of the gang” in the UK Parliament.
Menachem Begin, once premier of Israel, was an old terrorist, as was of course Arafat, a common criminal until Carter anointed him one of the statesmen of the age… it happens all the time.
The Nazis would have done what everyone does, re-brand themselves as ‘the German Patriot Party’ or some such.
It’s why we have no ‘communists’ in the United States.
Entonces, Z man extrapolates from a very plausible ‘counterfactual’ here. Had Hitler been pushed aside, or died, weeks or months before the Russians were in Berlin, yielding an opportunity for not just the Speers, but even the Himmlers, to “tidy up” before the allied armies pushed through, they could well have survived – and possibly even thrived – under post-war arrangements: as a political organization, that is, not just as meatsticks.
Look, no one ever got beat – militarily – more soundly than Saddam Hussein in 1991. Yet, there he was, twelve years later, still enjoying the benefits of ruthless power; he just stopped invading countries.
Thread winner. Excellent.
When you say “…and others that profited doing business with the Nazis during the war.” I take that to mean Ford, Kodak, IBM, etc. At least have the courage to list just a few of the many American companies that profited from Nazi rule. There’s no doubt American bankers did quite well also.
Let us be clear – there’s a huge gap between how German and American companies view and manage their employees. The relationship between professionals and skilled labor in Germany still remains respectful and bound in a common effort to ensure everyone’s benefit for a successful and profitable company. The average German receives 30-days paid vacation, health benefits, a pension program, and other employee benefits American workers can only dream of. It may sound like a socialistic concept, but it’s worked quite well for over 120-years.
“Wherever big business prevails, freedom declines and markets collapse.” It’s interesting to note that all the German companies you mention who existed before WW-2 are still in existence and are still profitable. Last time I checked, there were no American auto companies in Germany building cars. Meanwhile VW and BMW are doing very well in America, employing Americans and selling American built German cars to Americans.
Remind me again what happened to Westinghouse, RCA, Zenith and Kodak…?
Even in this Nazi fantasy-world you describe, no German company would follow the hire and fire mentality of the Americans. Many of our old, established companies are hugely successful and hold world dominance in their market sectors. Yet we have lost no freedoms due to successful businesses nor have our markets collapsed. Clearly you are referring to American companies that have a habit of offshoring and laying off American workers in order to stay in existence. And even then, that’s not always worked out (see the four references above).
It sounds to me this article is wishful thinking for how American industry and American freedoms once were. That despite Germany being the loser in WW-2 America has become the biggest loser in the industrial battle, now second place to China. And every day, you watch more and more of your rights and freedoms stripped away by your own Government.
Germany’s success and European dominance has nothing to do with Nazi politics. It has everything to do with a set of social constructs we Germans hold in high regard; free education, excellent health care, personal fiscal responsibility and a social safety net that ensures Germans don’t end up living in tent camps along the Rhine.
And now Karl watch all of that wash away in a generation as you mass import Muslims and destroy your own country.
Until then we have great German companies like VW cheating on emissions scandals.
Those arbitrary emissions standards and lawsuits are a way to twist Merkel’s arm into accepting Hillary’s ‘immigrants’.
Pure extortion.
Most of the alternate theories on Germany seem to assume Stalin and the USSR would have stayed as they were. We should remember that an industrialized Europe and Germany would be dependent on oil, which they had relatively little of.
The Nazis might have made a big deal out of Lebensraum and such, but what they were really after by breaking the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was the massive oil wells in the Caspian Sea area, hence the decisive battle happening at Stalingrad, which was the major distribution center for Soviet oil coming from the Caucasus.
If Germany had not invaded the USSR, they would be at the mercy of Stalin’s willingness to sell them oil to keep their machines running. When your neighbors have lots of oil to power their own increasingly industrialized society and you risk having none, you have things to worry about.
Could be, but I don’t think so. Hitler didn’t invade Ukraine and other sections of the USSR just to get at the Caspian oil fields a thousand miles away; he wanted the Ukraine. Food – or the lack of it – proved crucial in the defeat of 1918; seizing the Ukraine was a solution to the recurrence of this problem.
Thus, as of June 22, 1941, Hitler’s goal was to reclaim the old Brest-Litovsk boundaries of early 1918; however, the dizzying success of his armies over the coming weeks went to his head and all his ideas changed – as what happens to monomaniacs.
All evaluations of Nazi “strategy” at any point in their history after 1933 must begin with the blunt fact that Hitler was not entirely sane.
Herodian;
Romania was an alternate (but insufficient) source of oil to the USSR or what came in via tankers through Hamburg, etc. before the war.
There is a fascinating, but highly underreported case made that Stalin was poised to attack Hitler later in the summer of 1941* in order to institute world-wide communism. In this telling, Hitler struck first in order to safeguard and secure the resources he needed to fight the English and the only sorta neutral US, oil supplies being foremost but far from the only important ones. That’s why the Wehrmacht was so easily able to run through European Russia at first. Here is a ‘pro & con’ general discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controversy
For more detail, see any of the books by ‘Victor Suvorov’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov
Suvorov is a Cold War defector from Russian Military Intelligence (GRU). He posits that Stalin played a prominent role in bringing Hitler to power in the first place. His best work in the subject, IMHO: https://www.amazon.com/Chief-Culprit-Stalins-Grand-Design/dp/1591148065/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523914245&sr=8-1&keywords=the+chief+culprit
It is usually conveniently ignored that Hitler and Stalin were allies for 2 years (1939 – 1941). This argument, of course, exonerates neither of the two bloody butchers of mankind. But it does lend a highly interesting twist to all the theorizing about German political developments after WWI and before WWII.
Specifically: No WWI, no sealed train for Lenin. No Lenin, no Communist attempted coup in Germany in 1918 & 19. No Lenin, no Stalin. No coup and no Stalin, no Hitler.
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*Specifically 6 July 1941.
“Romania was an alternate (but insufficient) source of oil to the USSR…”
You must mean Nazi Germany. After Germany declared war on the USSR, most of their oil was supplied by Romania. By the time Romania switched sides and joined the Allies, it was pretty much over and Germany was well in retreat.
At any rate, it’s hard to imagine the USSR simply keeping their business within their borders and not ever making a power play for Europe, particularly given their internationalist ideology.
Herodian;
I largely agree with what you said. Other than the USSR, Romania was the only significant source of oil for Germany once the Allies cut Europe off from overseas supply, and that was never enough. Perhaps a poor choice of word order on my part caused some confusion.
Romania became a willing ally of Germany after Stalin grabbed a province from them in 1940 via threat of invasion. Romania switched sides to the Allies once the Red Army invaded them: They had no choice in the matter.
Stalin demanded and got significant supplies of fuel from the US after we entered the war in late 1941, so It is not clear that even the supplies from the Caspian area would have been enough for the Red Army to beat the Wehrmacht.
The Nazis felt that modern art was corrupting the German race. They stripped 16,000 artworks from German museums and used 650 of these proscribed images to stage a series of exhibitions called Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) beginning in 1937. The purpose of which was to instill in the German public a feeling that these images were anti-German, the vast majority of which held no overt anti-German content. The Nazis simply decided which images were permissible and which images weren’t in order to facilitate the removal of groups they were opposed to. Think of the now growing defenestration of monuments and images in the West viewed as “hateful.”
So, the Nazis, with or without Hitler would have eventually run headlong into the modern West’s obsessions concerning racial and sexual identity and the current perception of human rights. In fact, it’s Putin and his traditionalist atitudes that are more similar to Nazism than modernist West and Merkel’s Germany.
There’s a documentary that used to be available via Netflix called The Rape Of Europa. It gave a good account of the reasoning behind the art bans. Enough that I found myself agreeing
Some have called the EU the method by which Germany takes over Europe without firing a shot, so it makes sense that the EU has evolved to look like some hypothetical version of Germany.
Hitler was already pretty ill during his final years. he likely would have died in the 50’s and be replaced by someone more moderate, similar to what happened to Russia and China
> Another probable outcome is Hitler would have been deposed at some point after peace with the rest of Europe.
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Probably not. Hitler had control of the military by law, by custom, and by personal oaths of the ranking officers; he had remarkably little control over the civilian sector, which was run by the national Party and the gaus. Nazi Germany was far from the absolute dictatorship most people assume.
The best single volume describing this is probably Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich.”
A postwar Germany no longer following an expansionist policy would probably function much the same no matter who was Fuhrer; the Third Reich has been described as a “gangster government”, and that’s not entirely an exaggeration, though it was probably more like the old feudal system/
As far as resembling a feudal system, it depends on what kind of feudal system we are talking about. There was no serfdom per se, but neither was there in the feudal system referred to as the old regime at the time of the French Revolution. The way I think of it having resemblance is in the multiple layers of hierarchy and the way that traditional German political and cultural structures interacted with the Nazi structure. There were constant conflicts, disagreements and questions as to whose jurisdiction covered something and who was responsible. This resulted in a lot of seemingly mundane questions being passed up the line of command in certain circumstances. On the other hand, with all of these overlapping jurisdictions, a question could be settled by someone and handled at a lower level if the initiative were seized.
I think it worked better up until the system was threatened with existential crises, and when things began to go downhill more questions were passed up the line out of fear. The same was true in the late 1780’s in France.
TLDR: A non-militaristic, non-genocidal Nazi Party would be a contradiction in terms. Those were defining traits from the start, not some later distortion imposed on them, and the argument Z is making does not bear scrutiny.
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As a basic matter of history, Germany’s military buildup began as soon as Hitler took office, and clearly preceded that of France and England. This is not in dispute.
Moreover, as others have observed, Germany actively sought out conflict by relentless expansionism. Even if you want to be extremely generous and say that Hitler’s claims on German-speaking places like the Sudentenland were legit, the rest of the 1930s Eastern European adventures were clearly aggressive wars of expansion, the invasion of Poland was done with the full knowledge that France and Britan would respond, and the invasion of Russia drives the point home to the point of parody. Hitler deeply desired war, the Nazis deeply desired war, and the parallel story of Mussolini’s (incompetent) expansionism suggests that it was pretty much a universal trait of fascism.
And five minute’s thought explains why: as an ideological matter, a Master Race pretty much assumes one or more Subject races. The Nazis took normal human tribalism, the “my people are better than their people” up a notch, to “my people are naturally ordained to rule over their people.” You can live peacefully, and trade with, a neighbor you think is an asshole. You aren’t going to live peacefully with a neighbor you think is dwelling on land rightfully belongs to you.
As a political matter, Nazism arose in response to the humiliations of Versailles. Once you raise the banner of “we’re gonna fight back against those people that screwed us” you’re pretty much committing yourself to fighting back in some way, shape or form, or else you’re shown to be a phony. If the Nazi party had tried to stop expanding before Poland, make those borders permanent, and say that they wanted peaceful coexistance with Western Europe, they would have immediately faced internal opposition on their own right … and legitimately so, because that wasn’t what the Nazis campaigned on. They began life and rose to power as armed and uniformed gangs in the street beating up Communists, for heaven’s sake.
All of which makes the claim that “the choice of mass murder was not the first option for the Nazis, … In a peaceful world, the most likely scenario would have been the traditional one, where Jews, gypsies, slaves and anyone else deemed undesirable would have been exiled to lands at or beyond the border” risable nonsense. Where, exactly, would these “lands beyond the border” be? The Nazis were invading all the places they could have been exiling them to!
Dachau opened in 1933. The Nazis pushed Mussolini to toughen up his not-anti-semitic-enough policies in the mid-30s. They were opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Some Nazi theorists were talking about sending them all to Madagascar or whatnot, but well before 1939, they were making it harder, not easier, for Jews, et al to self-deport. Hell, if “send them all far away” was the goal, it would have been easier and cheaper to just send all those trains full of Jews to some distant border somewhere, unload them, and tell them to get lost. Instead, they built huge camps, full of fences to keep people in. True enough, the actual wholesale genocide didn’t start until 1941, but there was never time where actual Nazi policy suggested their final goal was for the various “undesirables” to leave and go somewhere far away. It was always about these groups ceasing to exist, even if it took them a couple years to work up to the task.
Nazi Germany relentlessly chose to expand geographically, as a fundamental part of its reason to exist. The “nationalist” side of “national socialism”. The communists had a similar notion, but they were more about capturing people and the national geography part was somewhat incidental. The “international” element of communism. Totalitarian movements of all sorts have a “grow or die” mentality about them, that put them in constant conflict with others who likely would simply prefer to be left alone.
The Russian communist experience is instructive to this conversation, because the aggressive and often violent movement to “free the oppressed workers” was largely displaced by a powerful and wealthy elite of old men who chose to largely live off the economic fruits, such as they were, from their own constellation of subject peoples. Will China go the same way? For that matter, how does our current crony capitalism play out, which seems to be going in the same direction? The wealthy old men in Nazi Germany never got past 1945 to get to that point, but many others seem to be doing so, and have done so, by feeding on their own less wealthy people, rather than undertaking foreign adventures.
So the underlying question is, would the Nazis have gotten to that point? I vote yes, they would have, when the old men running the country would have found easier pickings preying on their own, rather than taking on outside conflicts. At some point, the expensive cost-benefit payoff of foreign adventures turns the elites against their own, which represents a softer target with a greater payoff and a lesser cost.
Think of our second amendment as a way of increasing the cost side of our own crony capitalist elites trying to prey on the rest of us. That’s why they hate 2A so much.
You’re just restating the familiar plot. The point of the exercise is to break free of the orthodox narrative and consider the Nazis in different circumstances. Whether you realize it or not, you’re just saying “The Nazis were what they were because they were Nazis.”
But the Nazis created those circumstances, out of their intrinsic nature. The expansionism was baked into the cake, and while one can imagine them open to a guarded peace with the UK and/or Russia, at a bare minimum they’d be perpetually putting down ethnic revolts in France, Eastern Europe, etc. for a period of decades if not centuries. They were never going to be low-impact, keep-your-local-gods, imperial hegemons … the logic of their whole ideology meant that they were always going to be demanding that other people accept second class status in their own homelands; and the only way you get that is with guns and armies, and the only way you get that is a lot of gun factories and a highly milatraized society.
Claims like “Germany was turned into a munitions factory in order to wage war and that altered the nature of the Nazi party.” are simply nonsense. Again: the arms buildup began more or less five minutes after they took power, because they knew that creating the world they desired would require they create and maintain a highly milataristic society. That was what they wanted, not something imposed on them.
Asking what they would be like if they weren’t aggressively militaristic is asking what the Nazis would be like if they weren’t Nazis. That’s not an intriguing counterfactual, it’s an exercise in nonsense on the order of “what would the circle be if it was a square?”
Were they arming up to grow the economy as a command economy, AND because they knew they would attacked again (Versailles, Weimer, Austrian Creditanstaldt?)
Become Sparta or be conquered?
Without the chicken farmer how far would the mystic homo erotic ceremony surrounding the SS and the final solution have gone?
It’s fun and easy to talk big smart from the safety of an ocean and seventy years as moats.
I’ve noticed this with the pink triangles symbol thing too that ThaGheyz think is so cute. Bet your ass nobody was laughing about it in 1938 though, now were they?
Predicting possible futures is always fun but more applicable to science fiction than socio-politcal speculations.
Churchill created animosity both in England and among the Allies by trying to convince the world that the economic burden placed on Germany was going to backfire, which it did. Then, proof of the worthless restrictions placed on Germany, the nations that became the Allies ignored the pre-war military buildup in Germany.
The double whammy of war debts and the world wide depression are in large part the cause of Germany’s turn to Hitler. The German elites were smart enough to realize that the war dept could be paid off by inflation, but did not seem to care what was happening to the German people. Inflation was deadly to German life, which created a lot of support for change, even if it was Hitler. Anti-Semitism in the land of Ashkenaz seems to be part of the European DNA, so making the Jews the enemy was inevitable, I think. Not so different that what is happening today among liberals.
A final question poorly considered by Buchanan was the Soviet Union under Stalin. Stalin was dedicated to world domination and was happy to export revolution every possible way, re. the Spanish Revolution. Read “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. The Spanish Revolution was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, and the world knew it. (Interesting question: was Franco really a fascist or just looking for help where he could find it? Again, read Churchill about France’s support for the Revolution and tacit approval of Soviet support for the rebels. Also pay attention to Franco’s relationship with Hitler.” The Soviet threat was real and Hitler recognized and exploited it long before Americans did.
I think Buchanan is a supporter of Alternative History out of convenience. He is no friend of the Jews, so Nazi ideology is a smaller issue for him.
I would argue somewhat against “Germany turning to Hitler”. His party was one of many movements across the political spectrum, and the moment that got to the top of the political heap, with a plurality of votes but nowhere near a majority, it struck to protect its position by infiltrating and manipulating the rest of the political system. Combining an aggressive, brutal, and vengeful presence in the streets, along with a carefully crafted political campaign designed to appeal to emotion, not logic, and there you are. The German people, after a certain point, were along for the ride, whether they wanted to go along or not. An important lesson for what is going on around us right now.
Without the Federal Reserve Act, the Great War is just the War of 1914. A six month stalemate and a long negotiated settlement. No Fed=no Money. Next, the tragedy of Versailles treaty. Then after a fifteen year pregnancy the Fed delivers the Great Depression. Now Uncle Dolphie is charged and ready to go. But perhaps none of these factors has the corrosive effect that Democracy did in Germany. They call it the Wiemar Republic as if it were something special, peculiar, one off. It wasn’t. Perhaps the important lesson for what is going on around us right now is what democracy really is. We do appear to be taking our turn in that barrel.
Franco was a Monarchist, the suggestion he was a facist was because early in the revolution he forced the amalgamation of the Carlist (a monarchist faction) and the Falange (Spanish Facist) then assumed total control of the new entity. At that time infighting between the factions in the revolution were causing significant problems. In fact he jailed the former leader of the Falange and put a death sentence on him (Never carried out). In 1948 when the Falange got uppity he destroyed the leaders and dedicated members.
Anybody here watched Babylon Berlin? Have any thoughts on it?
The only two takeaways I got from it were that German society was chaotic and broadly criminalized at the time, and bad totalitarian political movements were percolating. Read the book (the source of the miniseries) and half of the characters are gone, and almost all of the main plot points and events are completely different, like a parallel universe.
Which is halfway relevant to today’s conversation, the crux of it being whether you end up roughly in the same place in history, no matter the players and the details? That is the question Z-man is throwing at us today.
How would you rate the book?
I’ve only seen 3-4 episodes on the show so far. Worth finishing the season in your opinion?
As a Weimar Germany version of a police procedural crossed with a soap opera, the miniseries works, if you are into that sort of thing. Some of the coincidences and situations that make the plot move are rather far-fetched, which typically come with the crime mystery story-telling territory. The visual detail of the miniseries is awesome, for the most part. It touches on quite a few traditionally culturally forbidden things in German history to talk about—perhaps things have loosened up in recent decades. There are all sorts of underlying themes, the undercurrent of residual fondness for the Bismarck years and the attitude of how the military was sold out by the politicians in WW1, the PTSD of the soldiers, the integration of Jews in the society, and how Jews ran many parts of the country. The casual criminality, and the utter poverty and desperation that so many people lived in.
The book is more strictly a Weimar era police procedural without most of the underlying themes in the miniseries. The original German title translates to “the wet fish”, apparently a euphemism for an aged unsolved crime. Not much cultural commentary in that title. The book has almost nothing to do with the miniseries, other than a few major plot points, and even the main characters outside of Wolter are completely different personalities. Sort of like reading or watching the different Batmans (Batmen?) over time.
I got a kick out of that “non-stop” elevator and the two young women renting a bath tub for 15 minutes.
Otherwise, okay. And a change from all the USA, British and (occasional) French we see all the time.
Hmpffff. One of the hallmarks of successful empires is a means of controlled succession. Consider the Mongols, perched on the eastern borders of Europe with nothing but easy pickings in front of them: The Khan dies back home, everyone goes back home to fight for control… And the empire goes into decline. I think the same would have happened to the Nazis if you tried to depose the great war types that built the party and led it. A massive dog fight, political cleansing, possible civil war with consequences that might have started an alternate version of WW2.
The big reason Keynes had the ear of so many people is because he correctly predicted the outcome of Versailles, not because of his book on the theory of employment, interest and money, which was basically unreadable. That was popularized by subsequent interpretors.
There is a good theory that Hitler realized that he’d painted himself into a corner with heavy wage and price controls in peacetime and initiated a war economy in order to avoid the chaos that would have resulted after necessary corrections, which would have destroyed the image of him as economic wonder worker.
Reading Speer’s book, Inside the Third Reich, I didn’t get any impression of a particularly astute economic mind. He projects no general awareness of conditions created by the prewar price controls, or conditions outside of those that presented themselves to him in his immediate tasks. He was merely a fairly competent manager, able to give an accounting of his activities and he did show an ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Hidden away in the deep recesses of the book is his lamentation that he never managed to get war production up to the level achieved by his counterparts in the Great War, but no awareness of the circumstances limiting that ability despite increased industrial technology. He does lay some blame on the capriciousness of his furher.
So my sense of things is that Germany would not have faired well under continued Nazi rule, and war would have been forced or chosen at some point. To me speculation should probably center on whether the Allies would have allowed an armistice under slightly different circumstances, and what the result of that would have been. I think heavily monitored elections would have been part of this.
I’m also of the opinion that the man makes the ideology, rather than the ideology making the man, and that the natural tendencies of Germans led both to the Nazi age as well as this one, and they are similar in psychological undertones, the difference being the direction of the efforts. The drive for hegemony and insistence on conformity of mind are the same.
The point of the exercise is to imagine what Nazism would be like with stable minded leadership. That’s why you have to stipulate that the younger generation would have pushed aside the great war generation. otherwise, the type of system would be irrelevant as even the ideal political economy, run by madman, ends in disaster.
That would be the implication of having the Allies heavily monitor any elections in the event of an armistice, or of the political consequence of lifting wage and price controls without going to war.
Looked at one way, controlling costs artificially is all about maintaining political power, not managing an economy.
The French Revolution was caused by state debt. That debt never went away in a real sense all through the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly, the Constituent Assembly, the National Convention, the Revolutionary government, the Directory, or Napoleon. It hung over France throughout, and had consequences reaching far into the nineteenth century.
I think the debt had a lot to do with the Girondists’ desires to go to war, the total mobilization of the Revolutionary government, and the wage and price controls of the latter. The Gironde had it a bit backward. They could have kept power longer if they had imposed controls and then went to war rather than going to war without controls, which helped undo them.
The Nazis were facing the same dynamics. These tricks put off the reconning, but it will come. Gods of the cookbook headings and all that.
The next generation faces the same problems.
No matter how much I dislike Germans, you’ve got to hand it to them, the one lesson they learned from all this is balancing their budgets, and they do it better than anybody.
Allegedly smart people believed in wage and price controls into the 1970’s. That was the Nixon policy.
That was in part based on the misconception that what the Soviet Union was doing was working, and fond memories of the War Industries Board in WWI and NIRA/alphabet soup agencies in the 1930’s and WWII years. Bernard Baruch’s memoirs had a lot to do with that. Funny thing is, both he and Keynes both talked about their ideas as things that could help in extreme circumstances, and the people who came after simply went about trying to implement them all the time.
At the time of the Spanish Flu, germ theory was widely understood, yet many health officials instinctively blamed bad air for the epidemic. Bad ideas have an inertia to them. People who should know better will cling to the bad ideas, in the face of all evidence. Wage and price controls are good examples. They just seem to feel right as a short term mechanism. Look at China. They are engaging in similar behavior with regards to their domestic economy.
Often, political leaders choose bad polices because they serve their narrow interest in the moment. Tiberius and flexible glass.
It’s why it is wrong to assume the Nazis would have been what they were if the circumstances were different. They did not spring from nothing.
New research shows bacteria and virus are spread more by miasma than by directional coughing and sneezing. Just consider the size of exhaled water vapor (that float on air) vs much larger droplets of saliva and phlegm in a sneeze/cough (which are heavier than air).
Additionally, new research shows that air vents in bathrooms for drying your hands actually cause more bacteria coliforms on the hands than drying by paper towel, meaning still air is healthier in polluted environments.
Koreans’ fear of fans doesn’t seem so far-fetched afterall.
There’s probably something similar to the nature-nurture argument where the interplay of peoples and ideas is concerned. I think certain peoples are more likely to come up with and develop certain ideas because their genetic makeup predisposes them to. But circumstances and free will also play a role. Nothing is written in stone, but tendencies can be discerned.
John Kenneth Galbraith vs. the entire editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, who told him it wouldn’t work. Another liberal economist, think Krugman..
By its very nature Nazis could not have stable status quo leadership. That’s Buchanons flaw and frankly idiocy. The Nazis wanted a giant Roman style slave state. Slavery of other races was the core of Nazis. Those to be made slaves were sure to fight.
Hitler was not new. He was old, like Sargon of Akkad. Enslaving his neighbors was the core of his movement and his appeal.
Which is why I said the most likely near term result of peace would have been a period of turmoil as the leadership cannibalized itself. Eventually, the next generation would have assumed power.
Himmler is usually cast as the evil super genius of the Reich, but he was a terrible politician and he did seem to realize that Hitler and many of the leadership were nuts. A guy like Speer, on the other hand, was incredibly clever when it came to handling the Nazi leadership.
Buchanan has a blind spot here, claiming that somehow the Nazis would have become more tractable and mainstream “conservative” if we had done some things differently. If they had, they would no longer be Nazis. The nominal conservatives and establishment thought they could control Hitler and his movement when he became Chancellor in 1933. They thought he was becoming “moderate” when he decapitated the SA in 1934.
We know now he had no intentions whatsoever of moderation, nor of being satisfied with simply reversing the verdict of Versailles and restoring German borders as they were before 1914. There was nothing short of complete surrender to Hitler’s aims that would have moved him from his planned war for Lebensraum. There’s no alternate version of Hitler that seeks peace or actually respects a treaty. Hitler continually said to his inner circle that he had to have war by 1943 at the latest to achieve his goals in his lifetime-he was, in his mind, the Aryan Messiah, and no successor could do what he could. It was now or never. Really, any idea of a Hitler willing to be tamed misses the point of Hitler himself or his movement-it was explicitly dedicated to destroying the status quo in Europe. It was just as revolutionary as Bolshevism and had the same Utopian ideology with race instead of class war. That’s baked into the cake.
It is impossible to know. The point of this exercise is not to pretend the book of life is written in advance and in stone. It is to image how the Nazis would have evolved in peace time.
That’s the crux of the matter-the Nazis were never at peace. Their Social Darwinist thinking precluded it. “Peace” was only a tactical pause to absorb the resources from the previous conquest to prepare for the next war. People misunderstand “Blitzkrieg” to mean the operational art of war, when it really was a strategic concept to avoid a repeat of WWI. Each little war feeds the next, against only one isolated opponent at a time, and temporary pacts made to prevent a major power coalition against the Reich (see the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact as an example)
The German generals and the Kreisau Circle understood this, but never had the guts to pull the trigger on a coup until far too late on July 20, 1944. The real counterfactual is positing a successful removal of Hitler by the German Army in 1938, as there were several plots afoot to actually do so. Had the French and British not caved during the Studeten crisis, Anschluss, or the final act a Munich, the generals might have acted, but appeasement cut their legs out from under them.
Any counterfactual without Hitler must focus on the real power behind the throne- Himmler and his SS, the state within the state. If Hitler had been assassinated or had a fatal heart attack prior to 1939, how would the power struggle among the Nazi satraps gone?
One possible outcome for the Nazis was the one we know from our mythologies. Another, one where war was no longer an obvious answer to domestic problems, was a period of internal power struggles. War made Hitler indispensable. Peace would most likely have made him and many others expendable.
Z Man;
It’s all moot. The Nazi’s were *not* going to survive WWII. This was because of the cleaver strategy and diabolical plans of Stalin plus the well hidden military power of the USSR. That was my (too obscure_?) point in my dialog with Herodian below. Once you read Suvorov, the light goes on and you can’t unsee it any more.
TlDr: Stalin always did his evil deeds using somebody else’s hands. His plan for the Nazi’s was that they would work as an ‘Icebreaker’ to smash up the European capitalist states. And he would help Hitler to do it by making Germany *temporarily* resource independent. At that point, when the war was (Stalin thought) going to be deadlocked, he would suddenly strike to bring ‘peace and happiness to the peasants and workers of the world’ by stabbing Hitler in the back. The military strategy featured sudden resource cut-off plus a diabolically brilliant operational plan to use the Red Army in a mechanized strike across the easy tank country of S. Poland straight through central Germany, the Fulda Gap and across the middle Rhein.
But Hitler figured out (too late for him) what Stalin was up to and beat Stalin to the punch by a few weeks. So Stalin only ended up with half of Europe instead of all of it.
Brilliant. Original.
As you said, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Again, I must nominate you for pro-consul.
Since Joe Kennedy and Prescott Bush paid for Hitler’s first campaign headquarters, the Brown Building, I assumed he was paid to protect American industry from Rotfront saboteurs. (Marx told Dutch workers to throw their wooden shoes- sabots- into the gears of machinery, thus, ‘saboteurs’.)
I also presume that Weimar was staged by globalists to reduce and exploit the world’s best workers as desperate slaves.
It seems that Hitler, the small fish, shopped around hoping to exploit the larger fishes’ offers. Trying to play them, as they tried to play him.
Albert Speer is alive and well.
https://blogs-images.forbes.com/joannmuller/files/2015/01/461495996-e1421195898961-1940×1090.jpg
A conservative friend retorted that Uncle Dolphie started the war by striking in all directions.
I have no answer. Why did he do so?
—————————–
Oops, almost forgot-
My nose is stuffed up, I’m coughing…
I blame Jewcus!
(h/t to Tax Slave)
EU is primarily French project with Germany added later on. In the 80’s Germany was (in economic terms) European sick man.
After the early 1950s, Germany was never a “sick man of Europe”. The EU was largely a French concoction, but it was done in part to contain Germany, not support it.
”Interestingly, what the Nazis imagined for Europe, where Germany sat atop a unified continent, is pretty much what the EU is today.” That type of EU likely would have worked, because all of ”Europe” would be under direct command of Germany as vassals (similar to how the Federal government deals with individual US states) with or without a single (Reichmark) currency. The EU as comprised today has it’s own Parliament with the Mark merged into the Euro – which doesn’t work, because each member state can set it’s own governance and economic policy. See Greece as but one example. We already know what Greece would be like under the Nazis, not much different, it’s whole economy is shipping, tourism, and agricultural products… Then and now.
Early WWII Nazi propaganda for a unified European Confederation was remarkably similar to the EU. All those foreign Waffen SS units were essentially fighting for that goal. Hitler killed the idea in ’43 as he was losing his mind and the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Confederation
It’s interesting, to say the least. There would be one company that likely wouldn’t have changed much war or no war – Volkswagen. The Beetle predates the war, when they shifted to war production they took the chassis design and turned it into their version of the Jeep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_K%C3%BCbelwagen Post-war, they went back to the Beetle.
Among the many blunders of post WWI was the Treaty of Versailles placing full blame of the war on Germany. People of our time can not understand what Germany was going through with unstable governments, food shortages, various political groups rioting and fighting in the streets. Then add in the devaluing of the currency and the resultant hyperinflation, the people were primed for a “savior”.
Most people forget that Adolf Hitler was originally supported by the industrialists, who thought they could control him. His message was simple, bread and work. Restore the dignity of Germany and lebensraum, living space.
Playing the what if game. If Hitler had died, for what ever reason, say in 1937 he would have gone down in history as a great leader. However, since that didn’t happen and most of the NAZI leadership were criminals and gangsters he was left unchecked.
Agreed. Hitler came to power in no small part because the Nazis were the only party that could keep the Communists under wraps. There’s a decent chance that without Hitler, Germany would have fallen to the Communists, as East Germany did after the War.
” history is written by the victor ”
And Jewish controlled Hollywood has been writing that history ad nauseam. My sympathies go out to the German people for this never-ending onslaught.
Really enough is enough
” history is written by the victor ”
This really never had much meaning.
Yeah, I read that same point you’re making in several Carthaginian accounts of the Punic wars.
I agree, considering that sometimes history is written by the “victims” who started the sh*tshow.
Z –
You’re a daily stop. Some days I have issues with what you write, but you are always stimulating and interesting.
I side with Patrick, and I do so for this reason – Wilson lied through his teeth about not taking us to war, and then did so anyway. Had we remained on the sidelines as we were properly and Constitutionally mandated to do (no treaty can over-ride the Constitution) – the “Great” war would have ended in ’14 or early ’15 in a stalemate, with a fairly equitable treaty amongst the various parties.
But Wilson was a proto-typical “progressive” who knew better (Hello, the Fed, the IRS/income taxes and the bloody 17th Amendment)(which is still screwing up the works today!). So Versailles came about, the unbearable reparations the rest of Europe laid upon Germany’s back, and the result was halfway predictable. By Neville’s time, Europe was full of quislings – kinda like today. For better or worse, Hitler had a nation he had to pull out of the sad results of Wilson’s idiocy.
And Churchill was still running amok. Roosevelt resisted Churchill as little as he did Uncle Joe. Out of WWII grew our “intelligence services.” The dots to today connect easily.
I’m not big on blaming Wilson. He was anything but the Progressive bogeyman that modern right-wing Progressives imagine. Teddy Roosevelt was the real monster of the story. He spend years goading Wilson into the war. It was the Roosevelt wing of the GOP that was pushing war, while Wilson resisted it.
Col. House
I think there’s plenty of blame for both. Wilson’s read-my-lips 2016 campaign and immediate about was a despicable betrayal.
Teddy saw living Empires and wanted one for himself.
British, French, Spanish, Ottoman, Russian, etc
Z –
Point well taken. But as I mentioned – Wilson had some major negatives even before the war with which we are still dealing today – the Fed, IRS, and the direct election of senators. Rather being the Upper Chamber that correct’s the goofs of the House – and having no real oversight – the Senate has become a gaggle of elected fools like the House. Few adults in the room when Congress is in session. What the Fed has done to our money is self-explanatory, and the IRS has morphed into an unconstitutional monster which frightens even the courts.
I’ll give you Bully Ted influenced Woody on WWI in idiotic fashion, but the rest of the tab due from Wilson’s watch is his alone. And tomorrow is a great time to remember his “legacy.” Pax – jb
Z Man;
Agree about T.R. to a point. But don’t forget that Imperialism was in the air all through the West at that time (late 1800s). Every Western elite wanted in on it, including the U.S. N.East elite that T.R. was so much a part of. In part it was a collective ego and fortune building trip.
A case in point was T.R.’s abiding passion for a ‘blue water’ navy. Now, given its geographic situation post 1875 or so, the US had no need of a ‘blue water’ navy for strictly national security purposes. Coastal defensive navy yes, big battleship navy, no. The British navy then ruled the waves. The UK was running (and paying for) a controlled, London-centered, sorta free-trade international system that we were basically OK with. We used tariffs to keep the English system from damaging our industrial economy, unlike today vs. Asia Inc.
Basically, once we achieved continental hegemony with good E -W rail connections, we had, in Canada, a very useful hostage against the British elite’s getting any ideas about using their navy against us. Actual Canada, then and now, is strung out along the US northern border and is no more than about 100 klicks wide. Woulda’ taken no more than a few days, moving north, even marching on foot, to cut it into bite-sized chunks by a reconstituted Union Army. And the English elite knew this. Why do you think they paid up for the English-built Confederate privateer damage claims after 1865.
No blue water navy, no need for a Panama Canal. No canal, no need to protect it by dominating the Caribbean, etc., etc.
Germany was in a similar situation at that same time. German imperialists were also agitating for a unnecessary blue water navy (aka high seas fleet). They asked Bismarck what he would do if the British Army was landed on the German North Sea coast. His answer: “I should have them arrested.”, (meaning that all 6 English divisions then at home, even if they could all be landed, stood absolutely no chance against the 80+ division Imperial German Army).
Kaiser Wilhelm II, a T.R. parallel figure, both in time and by personality, like T.R. just *had* to have a blue water navy, likewise mostly for prestige purposes. Unlike T.R. he paid a steep personal price for his egotistical folly.
Glenn Beck has been explaining to me for ten years or so why all my bitterness caused by ‘progressivism’ must be aimed at Woodrow Wilson. Apparently Glenn read a book he liked, that fingered WW as the bad guy: He’s the dark father of our social collapse, and that’s it.
OK, that noted, I won’t accept the notion the TR – or Wilson -was “the real monster” of any “story”. Wilson was not some ingenue in 1917; he’d been President for four years.
TR had been tossed aside by the GOP in 1912. Blaming him for US entry in the European war is like blaming Dwight Eisenhower for the Tet Offensive.
TR was very much a Progressive. He hated Taft; Wilson was too lame for him, and he wanted warfare as soon as possible.
He was a ‘neocon’ avant la lettre.
That said, TR did more to ‘crystallize’ America’s identity as a nation state than anyone except perhaps Lincoln: He beautified our coinage (and every coin collector blesses him for this); he instituted the national park system; he fought – successfully – against the money boys who ran the nation’s economy as a personal fiefdom. And of course he had our first ‘blue water’ navy built and manned by tip-top sailors.
It’s true that TR’s vision of America wasn’t Washington’s or Jefferson’s – but it was a vision that put us among the leading powers of the world, for all the good it did us…
I find nothing in TR’s writings – and he wrote extensively, by the way, the last of our presidents to do so – that suggest that his ‘progressivism’ included lesbian generals, transgendered college professors, or the rejection of constitutional law.
TR was kind of our Bismarck , another progressive.
The “Sonderweg” theory proves that Germans were good at resisting destructive cultural currents while still having a strong welfare state (by European standards at the time). This is why populism scares the shit out of the ruling elite: they know hardly anybody is on-board with democrats or progressives (outside of fanatics) except for the bribery and gimmes. If the right offers a good and pragmatic program, it can win. Tucker Carlson is right inasmuch as Trump thinks his victory is all about him, but if McCain wasn’t a whore and Romney wasn’t a spineless robot they could have won, too.
I think you’re wrong that the socialist aspects of Nazism were ad hoc, though. Hitler had practical reasons for the “Volkisch” measures like affordable cars and the construction of the autobahn, but his programs to spread music and culture were just part of his Weltanschaaung (he wasn’t rich but liked fine things and wanted them accessible to the common man). The greatest similarity between our current States and the Nazis is the weird Gleichschaltung we have, where the media, education, and corporations are all on the same page (“Trump will not divide us,” etc.). The uniformity of thought is creepy. Stephen Colbert has his audience trained well enough to make Goebbels or Bernays envious.
So much of this history has been forgotten, though. People laugh when you try to tell them Hitler wanted to send undesirables to Madagascar initially.
People still don’t know what the Nazis were fighting for, and no, it’s not anything said here or elsewhere.
The primary goal of Nazism (primary goal, not only goal) was to end the International Banking Cartel, which won the war and still rules the world today.
People stopped being redpilled properly in the economic question of the war after the massive influx of Libertarians in the election years.
I suggest to everyone to read:
“Web of Debt, by Ellen Brown”.
It’s a book about the history of money and economics, one of the few (maybe 3) books who knows what was going on at the time.
I’ll read ‘Web of Debt’ and I thank you for the recommendation.
That said, I can’t agree that Hitler and his Party were fighting a banking system, primarily or even secondarily. It sounds ridiculous, the kind of argument that plumbers – with a taste for history – would make, that the fall of the Roman Empire was caused by lead poisoning.
Any attempt to ‘rationalize’ the Nazi enterprise fails at the start-line, because Nazism was (after 1924) a program to seize power within a parliamentary system, by parliamentary means; ad hoc right up to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933. After that, ‘Nazism’ was whatever was in the head of Adolf Hitler.
It’s easy to forget, among those of us who try to put Hitler in context, that he was a dick.
You better read that book, mate, might get you a change of attitude.
Nothing is healthier than a change of attitude. Opinion means nothing; it’s all attitude, openness to correction.
Thanks, mate.
Teach me; where can my attitude be improved?
Your attitude is healthy and good; mine needs work. Help me.
Now that’s class. Tip o’ the hat, suh.
Andrew Jackson was a dick, but not so much that the sadists and perverts ran away with the system as they did under the syphilitic German.
Would love to read Web of Debt, appreciate the reminder- was Brown referring to the same militarized bankers that attacked Jackson when he paid off the national debt, giving us the second Bank of the United States and the Trail of Tears?
(Jackson raided the sovereign Cherokee nation in Georgia when gold was discovered there.)
I can see a direct line from the reinstallment of the Bank to the war with Mexico, 1848.
In Germany there is a strong labor presence. However, unlike unions in the United States they work with the management to see that the companies remain competitive.
On a different note, it is interesting that one of the goals of the Japanese Empire was the removal of European, i.e. white people ruling Asia. The Japanese lost the war, however their goal of ridding Asia of European dominance has mostly come to pass.
Hitler became a bit more hostile to labor after Georg Elser almost blew him to mince (but Hitler ended up being late to that beer hall due to a plane malfunction, I believe). That’s another place I disagree with Z-Man. Hitler had that mystical ability to dodge the big bullet (a la Castro or Saddam), and probably would have continued to do so if we didn’t win and smoke him out (like Saddam) or he didn’t put a bullet in his own head. He probably would have eventually faded into the background as a figurehead, like Paul Hindenburg, but I hazard he could have died of old age if the Nazis had won.