In the run-up to the 1932 German elections, the left-wing party was still calling the establishment-left party the “main” enemy, and fighting them in the streets and siphoning support away from them by running their own candidates in three-way elections that also included Hitler. A few years later, most of them were dead, since they were the very first of his targets, long before the Jews.
And the same pattern repeats today, with MLs calling everyone else ‘social fascists’ or like terms and crying “After Hitler Trump, us!”, while playing the victim if they’re ever called out on it.
The heroic SPD, who shoveled two million conscripts to their deaths in the pointless meat grinder of WWI (which killed 20 million, all told) and violently suppressed opposition to it in the name of “national unity.” Yes, I can see the resemblance.
By the way, the 1932 German Presidential election had three candidates: the nefarious communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, Adolf Hitler, and Paul von Hindenburg. The winner was not Hitler, it was Hindenburg, who then proceeded to appoint Hitler as chancellor. If only the KPD hadn’t split the vote between Hitler and the guy who would appoint Hitler, the guy who won anyway might have won and, uh, done exactly what he did, which is appoint Hitler chancellor and enable him to rise to power.
Obviously, the lesson to take away from this is that the people who tried to stop both world wars were on the wrong side of history, and the people who supported the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor in order to stop him from coming to power were right about everything and worthy of emulation.
The heroic SPD, who shoveled two million conscripts to their deaths in the pointless meat grinder of WWI (which killed 20 million, all told)
Yep, 100% accurate (and, a roughly-accurate analogy I think with modern Democrats doing insane things like supporting Israel)
and violently suppressed opposition to it
Er… which suppression are you talking about? I’m a little out of my depth on it but the only suppression I’m aware of came after the KPD started a violent rebellion against them. But like I say I’m not that well aware of it, can you tell me?
By the way, the 1932 German Presidential election had three candidates: the nefarious communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, Adolf Hitler, and Paul von Hindenburg. The winner was not Hitler, it was Hindenburg, who then proceeded to appoint Hitler as chancellor.
Once he won his 1932 term Hindenburg had Brüning as chancellor, then Papen, then Schleicher, amid a massive amount of infighting, and then after all that was Hitler. The vague picture I have is that infighting including but not limited to KPD vs. everyone else, strikes, street battles, and general chaos was a big part of what was making German politics nonfunctional and created the conditions where Hindenburg eventually had to work with Hitler.
Certainly the moderates in the Reichstag had to work with either the KPD or the Nazis, numerically, in order to get anything done, since none of those three factions had a majority. I’m out of my depth to say exactly how it played out or whose fault it all was. But I’m pretty confident in saying that “Hindenburg was secretly Hitler-friendly and got behind him instantly as soon as he was in office” is oversimplified, if that’s what you’re saying. For one thing, he’d been in office already for 7 years before that, and he had to die before the Nazis actually took over – it doesn’t seem to me like him in office was the key to Nazi takeover.
Would it have turned out different if it was 64% Hindenburg, instead of 51% Hindenburg and 13% Thälmann? And likewise with loyalties in the Reichstag? I’m sort of implying that it might have, but honestly I have no idea. And I likewise have no idea whose “fault” it was between the SPD and KPD that they were both pretty consistently at each other’s throats. I just know that part of the way it played out was rabid opposition to Hindenburg and the SPD from the left, rather than unification from them as the only alternative to Hitler, and that against that backdrop Hitler was able to make it work.
Obviously, the lesson to take away from this is that the people who tried to stop both world wars were on the wrong side of history, and the people who supported the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor in order to stop him from coming to power were right about everything and worthy of emulation.
I didn’t say they were on the wrong side of history, and I don’t think they were. I do think that their treatment of the SPD as “the real enemy”, and pursuit of “what we want in a perfect world” with no attention to “what’s the best outcome we can actually achieve” or “what will be the actual real outcome of chasing our perfect vision” is, in my opinion, part of what let Hitler come to power and got most of them killed a couple years later.
Er… which suppression are you talking about? I’m a little out of my depth on it but the only suppression I’m aware of came after the KPD started a violent rebellion against them. But like I say I’m not that well aware of it, can you tell me?
When a government gets millions of people killed for no reason, using violence against that government is completely justified.
And I likewise have no idea whose “fault” it was between the SPD and KPD that they were both pretty consistently at each other’s throats.
It was the SPD’s fault, for the whole, you know, “war that killed 20 million people” thing.
When a government gets millions of people killed for no reason, using violence against that government is completely justified.
Got it, I understand what you’re saying. Sure. Like I say, you’re not really wrong in this.
However, you could say, getting so bent out of shape when they use violence against you back against your rebellion that you’re still holding a grudge about it more than a decade later, even to the point of refusing to work with them against someone who’s going to get 75 million people (and nearly 100% of your particular political party) killed, seems shortsighted. That’s more my point than anything about “justified” or the right side of history.
Right, except that as established, the SPD were the ones who chose to back the guy who made Hitler chancellor. So it’s really more like, should they have backed the people who already got 20 million and a bunch of people from your party killed, so they can support the guy who’ll support the guy who’s going to get 75 million and virtually everyone in your party killed?
Your claim that Hindenburg winning by a wider margin could have possibly prevented Hitler’s rise to power is a counterfactual, even long after the fact, there’s no way to know if that’s true. I could just as easily say that the SDP could’ve thrown their weight behind Thälmann and that might have stopped Hitler, and maybe it would have, or maybe it wouldn’t. One way or another, the differences between the SDP and KPD were not one-sided, and those differences began over a disagreement where the SDP were clearly in the wrong and got millions of people killed for nothing.
I don’t really want to go in circles about this. The one additional thing I’ll say:
I could just as easily say that the SDP could’ve thrown their weight behind Thälmann and that might have stopped Hitler, and maybe it would have, or maybe it wouldn’t.
I think this is very true, yes. (Both the futility of speculating on what might have been, and the shared responsibility on the SPD side.) There’s some level of shared blame involved between the SPD for not unifying with the KPD, and the KPD for not unifying with the SPD. What the allocation is, I honestly don’t know enough to say.
On the other hand, I also do think it’s relevant that the countries run by the same people (ideologically) who were backing Thälmann turned into totalitarian nightmares, where people were risking death to flee from in order to get to places run by people like Hindenburg, in the decades after the war, when all the Hitler issues were in the past. If we’re going to analyze the viewpoint that the KPD was on the right side of history and the SPD should have dropped everything and unified with them, then I think that’s a relevant data point.
I suspect that you don’t see it that way precisely (in terms of the pleasantness level of postwar East Germany or USSR as places to live in compared with prewar Germany), and I probably won’t want to argue it out if you don’t agree with me on it – just saying my take on it according to my view of things.
On the other hand, I also do think it’s relevant that the countries run by the same people (ideologically) who were backing Thälmann turned into totalitarian nightmares, where people were risking death to flee from in order to get to places run by people like Hindenburg, in the decades after the war, when all the Hitler issues were in the past. If we’re going to analyze the viewpoint that the KPD was on the right side of history and the SPD should have dropped everything and unified with them, then I think that’s a relevant data point.
And if we’re going to bring that up, I think it’s a relevant data point that most of the countries you mention that were run by people like Hindenburg, where those people were fleeing to, were countries that had lots of wealth which had been built on centuries of slavery, exploitation, and colonialism, while most of the countries run by people like Thalmann were starting from a pre-industrial level and actively opposed, economically, militarily, and through assassinations, by the wealthy countries controlled by the people like Hindenburg. I would also point out the many, many cases of countries trying to enact policies that would benefit their people, without taking precautions against foreign subversion, who were murdered by the people like Hindenburg, and replaced by the people like Hitler.
Yep. All 100% accurate. In particular, the part about people who were trying to do socialism without good protection from a geopolitical superpower and getting some good results from it and then all getting assassinated by the US and forcibly replaced by a CIA backed mini-Hitler. All that shit happens and is probably still happening today.
I said I wouldn’t argue it out, but I don’t actually disagree with anything you said up there, and so I do want to say my take on it and explain a little more what I meant in context:
I think you’re 100% right on the evil nature of the big capitalistic countries. I think that a lot of that, though, is actually not to do with capitalism but is simply the nature of humans and power – big, powerful countries tend to be controlled by powerful men who want to accrete and use power in ways that are actively oppressive to all kinds of people at home and abroad, basically all the way up to the limit of what is the absolute rapacious maximum they can get away with.
It’s not to say capitalism’s not dangerous – it’s incredibly dangerous, both because of some unique dangerous features, and because it’s one effective engine for accreting power which then of course winds up in the hands of the wrong people. But, in my opinion (which you might not agree with), the history is that the non capitalistic countries that have risen to great power actually display more or less the exact same behavior – actually worse, for as bad of a standard as the big capitalistic powers set – within the limits of their power at the time. And the reason the US and Europe are such effective engines of oppression in the global south right now is not solely because they’re capitalist, but largely just because they’re the ones in a geopolitical position to be able to do it and get away with it.
This is not to say that it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem and talking about a solution to it sounds like a great thing to do. But I think the modern history of the USSR and China is a caution against thinking “if we can just get rid of the capitalism then that’ll get rid of the colonialism and domestic oppression, obviously.” I honestly don’t really know what the actual answer is, but it looks to me from just looking over the history of the 20th century from a non expert perspective that “more democracy” (like, actual democratic institutions, not US imperialism dressed up in a coat that says “democracy”) is a more reliable solution to imperialism than is “less capitalism.”
That’s my take on it. In general I think left and socialist solutions are the right way; that’s why I was talking about the KPD being on “the right side of history” because I agree with you about them – especially the ones of them who would have been politically active in the 1920s – not being the type to start world wars, but just going after justice for people economic and otherwise. But I also think that there’s a danger there of thinking that every left solution is going to be a good solution to every geopolitical problem without looking over the history and seeing how things play out in practice.
The KPD weren’t around when that was signed, on account of how Hitler murdered them. Because he correctly identified them as his chief ideological enemies.
As for the pact itself, it was signed after Stalin unsuccessfully attempted to form a unified front against Hitler with Britain and France. The latter two signed many agreements with Hitler, such as selling out Czechoslovakia, in the hope that he would stay focused on fighting the communists. Nobody was eager to get involved in a second world war.
Because he correctly identified them as his chief ideological enemies.
Curious, since their feuding with the SPD was instrumental in the rise of the Nazi Party, and that their puppetmasters cozied up to the Nazis at the first opportunity. Almost like it was just a power struggle with few actual ideological scruples involved.
It is curious. So curious, in fact, that your whole conspiracy collapses in the face of it.
since their feuding with the SPD was instrumental in the rise of the Nazi Party
It takes two to fued. Maybe the SPD should’ve tried not shoveling millions of people into a pointless war, or not killing KPD leaders who opposed it, or throwing their weight behind the only candidate who actually was neither Hitler or aligned with Hitler, or not saying the communists were just as bad as the fascists (you know, like you’re doing now).
Curious indeed considering that through the mid-20s the SPD and the KPD got along fine, and it was only with the ascension of the Stalinists in the party and in the Soviet Union that the KPD suddenly decided that the SPD were ‘social fascists’ and had to be opposed at every opportunity.
But I understand history is inconvenient to your pro-fascist narratives. :)
Curious indeed considering that through the mid-20s the SPD and the KPD got along fine
If you consider being beaten into submission and having all their radical leadership slaughtered “getting along fine” then yes, I suppose they “got along fine” for a very brief period in between violently opposing them and calling them fascists.
In the run-up to the 1932 German elections, the left-wing party was still calling the establishment-left party the “main” enemy, and fighting them in the streets and siphoning support away from them by running their own candidates in three-way elections that also included Hitler. A few years later, most of them were dead, since they were the very first of his targets, long before the Jews.
And the same pattern repeats today, with MLs calling everyone else ‘social fascists’ or like terms and crying “After
HitlerTrump, us!”, while playing the victim if they’re ever called out on it.The heroic SPD, who shoveled two million conscripts to their deaths in the pointless meat grinder of WWI (which killed 20 million, all told) and violently suppressed opposition to it in the name of “national unity.” Yes, I can see the resemblance.
By the way, the 1932 German Presidential election had three candidates: the nefarious communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, Adolf Hitler, and Paul von Hindenburg. The winner was not Hitler, it was Hindenburg, who then proceeded to appoint Hitler as chancellor. If only the KPD hadn’t split the vote between Hitler and the guy who would appoint Hitler, the guy who won anyway might have won and, uh, done exactly what he did, which is appoint Hitler chancellor and enable him to rise to power.
Obviously, the lesson to take away from this is that the people who tried to stop both world wars were on the wrong side of history, and the people who supported the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor in order to stop him from coming to power were right about everything and worthy of emulation.
Yep, 100% accurate (and, a roughly-accurate analogy I think with modern Democrats doing insane things like supporting Israel)
Er… which suppression are you talking about? I’m a little out of my depth on it but the only suppression I’m aware of came after the KPD started a violent rebellion against them. But like I say I’m not that well aware of it, can you tell me?
Once he won his 1932 term Hindenburg had Brüning as chancellor, then Papen, then Schleicher, amid a massive amount of infighting, and then after all that was Hitler. The vague picture I have is that infighting including but not limited to KPD vs. everyone else, strikes, street battles, and general chaos was a big part of what was making German politics nonfunctional and created the conditions where Hindenburg eventually had to work with Hitler.
Certainly the moderates in the Reichstag had to work with either the KPD or the Nazis, numerically, in order to get anything done, since none of those three factions had a majority. I’m out of my depth to say exactly how it played out or whose fault it all was. But I’m pretty confident in saying that “Hindenburg was secretly Hitler-friendly and got behind him instantly as soon as he was in office” is oversimplified, if that’s what you’re saying. For one thing, he’d been in office already for 7 years before that, and he had to die before the Nazis actually took over – it doesn’t seem to me like him in office was the key to Nazi takeover.
Would it have turned out different if it was 64% Hindenburg, instead of 51% Hindenburg and 13% Thälmann? And likewise with loyalties in the Reichstag? I’m sort of implying that it might have, but honestly I have no idea. And I likewise have no idea whose “fault” it was between the SPD and KPD that they were both pretty consistently at each other’s throats. I just know that part of the way it played out was rabid opposition to Hindenburg and the SPD from the left, rather than unification from them as the only alternative to Hitler, and that against that backdrop Hitler was able to make it work.
I didn’t say they were on the wrong side of history, and I don’t think they were. I do think that their treatment of the SPD as “the real enemy”, and pursuit of “what we want in a perfect world” with no attention to “what’s the best outcome we can actually achieve” or “what will be the actual real outcome of chasing our perfect vision” is, in my opinion, part of what let Hitler come to power and got most of them killed a couple years later.
When a government gets millions of people killed for no reason, using violence against that government is completely justified.
It was the SPD’s fault, for the whole, you know, “war that killed 20 million people” thing.
Got it, I understand what you’re saying. Sure. Like I say, you’re not really wrong in this.
However, you could say, getting so bent out of shape when they use violence against you back against your rebellion that you’re still holding a grudge about it more than a decade later, even to the point of refusing to work with them against someone who’s going to get 75 million people (and nearly 100% of your particular political party) killed, seems shortsighted. That’s more my point than anything about “justified” or the right side of history.
Right, except that as established, the SPD were the ones who chose to back the guy who made Hitler chancellor. So it’s really more like, should they have backed the people who already got 20 million and a bunch of people from your party killed, so they can support the guy who’ll support the guy who’s going to get 75 million and virtually everyone in your party killed?
Your claim that Hindenburg winning by a wider margin could have possibly prevented Hitler’s rise to power is a counterfactual, even long after the fact, there’s no way to know if that’s true. I could just as easily say that the SDP could’ve thrown their weight behind Thälmann and that might have stopped Hitler, and maybe it would have, or maybe it wouldn’t. One way or another, the differences between the SDP and KPD were not one-sided, and those differences began over a disagreement where the SDP were clearly in the wrong and got millions of people killed for nothing.
I don’t really want to go in circles about this. The one additional thing I’ll say:
I think this is very true, yes. (Both the futility of speculating on what might have been, and the shared responsibility on the SPD side.) There’s some level of shared blame involved between the SPD for not unifying with the KPD, and the KPD for not unifying with the SPD. What the allocation is, I honestly don’t know enough to say.
On the other hand, I also do think it’s relevant that the countries run by the same people (ideologically) who were backing Thälmann turned into totalitarian nightmares, where people were risking death to flee from in order to get to places run by people like Hindenburg, in the decades after the war, when all the Hitler issues were in the past. If we’re going to analyze the viewpoint that the KPD was on the right side of history and the SPD should have dropped everything and unified with them, then I think that’s a relevant data point.
I suspect that you don’t see it that way precisely (in terms of the pleasantness level of postwar East Germany or USSR as places to live in compared with prewar Germany), and I probably won’t want to argue it out if you don’t agree with me on it – just saying my take on it according to my view of things.
And if we’re going to bring that up, I think it’s a relevant data point that most of the countries you mention that were run by people like Hindenburg, where those people were fleeing to, were countries that had lots of wealth which had been built on centuries of slavery, exploitation, and colonialism, while most of the countries run by people like Thalmann were starting from a pre-industrial level and actively opposed, economically, militarily, and through assassinations, by the wealthy countries controlled by the people like Hindenburg. I would also point out the many, many cases of countries trying to enact policies that would benefit their people, without taking precautions against foreign subversion, who were murdered by the people like Hindenburg, and replaced by the people like Hitler.
Yep. All 100% accurate. In particular, the part about people who were trying to do socialism without good protection from a geopolitical superpower and getting some good results from it and then all getting assassinated by the US and forcibly replaced by a CIA backed mini-Hitler. All that shit happens and is probably still happening today.
I said I wouldn’t argue it out, but I don’t actually disagree with anything you said up there, and so I do want to say my take on it and explain a little more what I meant in context:
I think you’re 100% right on the evil nature of the big capitalistic countries. I think that a lot of that, though, is actually not to do with capitalism but is simply the nature of humans and power – big, powerful countries tend to be controlled by powerful men who want to accrete and use power in ways that are actively oppressive to all kinds of people at home and abroad, basically all the way up to the limit of what is the absolute rapacious maximum they can get away with.
It’s not to say capitalism’s not dangerous – it’s incredibly dangerous, both because of some unique dangerous features, and because it’s one effective engine for accreting power which then of course winds up in the hands of the wrong people. But, in my opinion (which you might not agree with), the history is that the non capitalistic countries that have risen to great power actually display more or less the exact same behavior – actually worse, for as bad of a standard as the big capitalistic powers set – within the limits of their power at the time. And the reason the US and Europe are such effective engines of oppression in the global south right now is not solely because they’re capitalist, but largely just because they’re the ones in a geopolitical position to be able to do it and get away with it.
This is not to say that it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem and talking about a solution to it sounds like a great thing to do. But I think the modern history of the USSR and China is a caution against thinking “if we can just get rid of the capitalism then that’ll get rid of the colonialism and domestic oppression, obviously.” I honestly don’t really know what the actual answer is, but it looks to me from just looking over the history of the 20th century from a non expert perspective that “more democracy” (like, actual democratic institutions, not US imperialism dressed up in a coat that says “democracy”) is a more reliable solution to imperialism than is “less capitalism.”
That’s my take on it. In general I think left and socialist solutions are the right way; that’s why I was talking about the KPD being on “the right side of history” because I agree with you about them – especially the ones of them who would have been politically active in the 1920s – not being the type to start world wars, but just going after justice for people economic and otherwise. But I also think that there’s a danger there of thinking that every left solution is going to be a good solution to every geopolitical problem without looking over the history and seeing how things play out in practice.
Ah, yes, the heroic KPD, the mouthpiece of the Soviets, definitely just trying to stop the mean ol’ Nazis
Fucking astounding how far you’ll go to sympathize with fascists. But hey, after Hitler, you, right?
The KPD weren’t around when that was signed, on account of how Hitler murdered them. Because he correctly identified them as his chief ideological enemies.
As for the pact itself, it was signed after Stalin unsuccessfully attempted to form a unified front against Hitler with Britain and France. The latter two signed many agreements with Hitler, such as selling out Czechoslovakia, in the hope that he would stay focused on fighting the communists. Nobody was eager to get involved in a second world war.
Curious, since their feuding with the SPD was instrumental in the rise of the Nazi Party, and that their puppetmasters cozied up to the Nazis at the first opportunity. Almost like it was just a power struggle with few actual ideological scruples involved.
It is curious. So curious, in fact, that your whole conspiracy collapses in the face of it.
It takes two to fued. Maybe the SPD should’ve tried not shoveling millions of people into a pointless war, or not killing KPD leaders who opposed it, or throwing their weight behind the only candidate who actually was neither Hitler or aligned with Hitler, or not saying the communists were just as bad as the fascists (you know, like you’re doing now).
Curious indeed considering that through the mid-20s the SPD and the KPD got along fine, and it was only with the ascension of the Stalinists in the party and in the Soviet Union that the KPD suddenly decided that the SPD were ‘social fascists’ and had to be opposed at every opportunity.
But I understand history is inconvenient to your pro-fascist narratives. :)
If you consider being beaten into submission and having all their radical leadership slaughtered “getting along fine” then yes, I suppose they “got along fine” for a very brief period in between violently opposing them and calling them fascists.
Ah, the only leadership that counts as TRULY radical is Stalinist and anti-democratic. I see, I see. So, average red fash.
Oh look, the tankie is back in this thread.
What can I say? I can’t resist the siren call of people being wrong on the internet.