Just as national socialism gradually evolved through good intentions and the nurturing of a socialist constituency, so our own brand of U.S. federal socialism grows. Obama and the leftists in congress track closely with the German national socialists of the 1930s. Every one of these movements in history came to a very bad end. What hubris to think our governments and courts could take over industry and banking, rewrite finance and contract law, redistribute wealth between the top half and the bottom half of the population, and ration medicine, while creating no negative consequences. We cannot know the future, but on this well-traveled road, we know, for many, it will be deadly and horrible.
Excerpts from “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: plunder, racial war, and the Nazi welfare state” by Gotz Aly, 2005.
ANY INVESTIGATION into Hitler’s ascent must thus examine the give-and-take relationship between the populace and the Nazi leadership. It is a matter of historical record that the party hierarchy was, from its earliest days, extremely unstable. The mystery is how it managed to stabilize itself, if only temporarily, so that the regime could survive for twelve spectacularly destructive years. Solving this mystery requires a more precise rephrasing of the general question “How could Nazi Germany have happened?” Namely, how did National Socialism, an obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal, and criminal undertaking, succeed in persuading the great majority of the German people that it was working in their interest? [Read more…]