The week's unfortunate YouTube moment came when I was offered a link to a picture of Hitler getting out of a Mercedes.
Given my opinions of Hitler and Fascism, I am concerned as to why I might be considered interested in this, but with an open mind and more than a degree of contempt I played the clip.
It was extremely uninteresting. One historical thug and a number of long-dead people cheering ....
What was more disturbing was the commentary from the YouTube contributors underneath. Historical revision, Nazi sympathies, you name it, were running amok.
Not much consistency or accuracy or true historical fact in the arguments, as you might expect. If one or more of the individuals writing this series of electronic faeces was/were German I could not really tell, but it read mainly like American English. The tone though was the Jews ran the German economy (85% of the banking system was a number quoted), they had run it into the ground and enriched only themselves in the process, and essentially they had to be cleaned out.
At the same time Communism (which would have, incidentally, closed down this "corrupt Jewish system" and was attracting wide support in Germany in the early 1930s) was a violent philosophy which had to be curtailed (given that the USSR was then led by Stalin, the thinking behind that can be understood) and was at the same time a part of the "Jewish conspiracy"!
Huh?
Consistent reasoning this is not. The corrupt bankers were Jewish, the Communist revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the banking system were Jewish - so Hitler was needed to stand up against both????
Hitler was needed like the proverbial hole in the head, and check out how much he cost Germany in the twelve years that he was in power! And there is no way that the 6,000,000 people assassinated in his name in that time were all controlling the banking system! A small fraction at best, even if the fact of that control is accurate, which I doubt but cannot prove.
OK, on to Communism. Imagine being in Germany in 1930. The memories of the mass inflation and economic meltdown of 1923 were still quite recent, even if between 1924 and 1929 there had been a recovery to some extent. Come October 1929. On the 3rd of that month, the man who had rescued the German economy in the middle of the decade (Gustav Stresemann - a Berlin Protestant pragmatic conservative, not a Jew) died. On the 29th of that month came the Wall Street Crash. The German economy, which was heavily dependant on the US economy at this stage, went South.
Unemployment went through the roof again, the spectre of poverty was suddenly everywhere again, the orthodox politicians had no solutions, the one who might have understood what to do had just died ....
It is easy to be wise after the event, history teaches us many lessons, but ask yourself what Communism offered. If you were a banker or an industrialist, you would find yourself paying a heavy price, and if you were a member of the military elite, it sounded like subservience to a foreign power (the Soviet Union).
But for the working person, the individual who had a badly paid job or now faced the extreme poverty of the unemployment line? Communism had foreseen this collapse. It had come. Communism offered in place of this disaster housing, secure worthwhile jobs, food, an end to debt, and all the related self-respect that had been lost.
And as the capitalists had been responsible for the collapse while you had turned up to work every day assiduously to do your job, and you had paid the ultimate price for THEIR MISTAKE! Trust us, don't trust THEM!
That this philosophy and thinking could in these dire circumstances attract some 17% of the vote, is it really so surprising?
Of course the promises were bogus, it could never have worked, but what were the alternatives? The current batch of orthodox politicians who seemed totally in disarray and lacked any clue as to how to resolve the situation? Hitler and the Nazis?
There are times when there are no satisfactory answers (ask people in Greece at the moment). This was one of them. Often idealistic solutions, which sound good at the moment when the everything is collapsing around you, will appeal despite the reality of what could be practically achieved.
In 1933, the appeal of Communism was such that in the city of Berlin the KPD outvoted Hitler's surging Nazi party in the last democratic elections of the Weimar Republic.
Hope springs eternal. So unfortunately do delusions! See the DDR between 1949 and 1989 if you want those delusions to be shattered.
But again think of the prospects - a secure roof over your head, a job in line with your abilities for which you were adequately rewarded and was always available to you, enough to eat without making a pig of yourself, a life in which you could always make ends meet and you never needed to put yourself into debt ....
Laudable objectives. Sad in its way that Communism could never deliver on such promises.
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