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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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but Germans voted in Hitler

Did they? My understanding was that the Nazis got much less than a majority, but the votes led to a plurality Nazi bloc in the legislature, and in the hopes of throwing them a bone in order to control them and assuage street violence, the President offered the chancellorship to Hitler as part of a theoretical pseudo-coalition. Then Hitler used the chancellorship to orchestrate extraconstitutional "emergency" power-grabs after the Reichstag fire, enabled through threats of violence to Reichstag members.

This would of course not be the last time someone thought "let's just give Adolf what he wants to satisfy him." But I would not describe what happened as "the German people decisively voted that they wanted the Nazis to have full control over society and Hitler to be a dictator." It's much more like a large group of Germans, some out of passionate love for Nazism and some out of desperation amid economic crisis, voted for the Nazi party, and then they used the first tiny, slight grip on power to establish a dictatorship through violence.

I thought the story was that the broad establishment coalition(conservative dominated but included everyone except Nazis and actual communists) needed either Nazi or commie votes to form a government, and picked Hitler over Stalin.

Either way, it remains true that Hitler did not win a democratic mandate.

"Proportional Representation: Literally Hitler"!

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