294
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
294 points (96.2% liked)
Today I Learned
17733 readers
123 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The social democrats were terrified of the workers turning to communism and destroying the Wiemar Republic to build a Leninist dictatorship of the people—a government steeped in authoritarianism and secret police. So they put their weight behind the Nazis in street-battles between brown-shirts and white-shirts. They failed to recognize that by lending legitimacy to any worker movement advocating for authoritarianism and secret police they were signing their death warrant. The Nazis were never that popular but the social democrats authorized the people to tolerate them, even if they didn't like them. The result? Hitler manipulated everyone around him into giving his party more and more power in the name of avoiding Communism. The very first thing he did after becoming the totalitarian authoritarian dictator? Make a pact with Stalin. Again. The Social Democrats created the perfect environment by co-signing Hitler to allow the very thing they were scaredest of to happen. That's why today you see anarcho-communists telling their followers to do things like "don't get involved with Wagner's uprising against Putin. They're not your friends. They're just a slightly different kind of fascist. Best thing we can do is sit back and them bleed eachother."
So that's... One full exploration of how the social democrats enabled Hitler, but there's also another. What did this band of pacifists do as Hitler plunged the world into the most deadly conflict in human history? Did they organize uprisings against him? No. They just kinda planned to wait him out, and remove him through peaceful means. That ship had sailed already but they didn't really get on board with the resistance movements going on within Germany either. If they were in modern times they'd be the people telling people not to march with the Black Lives Matter protests because the best way to get reform is via petition and working within the system. Bear in mind that Hitler completely threw the system in the trash and that the new system in his regime didn't really give room for anyone to resist him through legal means. The social democrats were the leaders that most Germans liked and respected. They were still community leaders, and I think they failed to recognize that a lot of people looked to them for guidance on what to do about Hitler and what they saw was to just go along with it, tolerate all the violence, and hope a better day would come.
If you're interested in an actual good journalist instead of some internet rando talking about all this check out Behind the Bastards: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible.
That's somewhat misleading, Molotov-Ribbontrop was in 1939, 6 years after Hitler rose to power.
During the 30s, the USSR tried to form an anti-fascist coalition, going so far as to offer to invade with a million men if Britain would join and station men in Poland in the event of a German invasion.
The rest of Europe considered the USSR a bigger threat, and were happy to let the Nazis have Austria and Czechoslovakia if it meant they'd go to war with the USSR and weaken them both. Britain even tried to join the Winter War, but was denied transit by Sweden.
So from Hitler's perspective, he could either invade the USSR and be in a 2-front war as soon as France and UK sensed weakness, or he could sign a non-aggression pact with the most aggressive opposition and have a 1-front war.
From USSR's perspective, they could either sign a non-aggression pact with Germany and force the west into the war, or they could not, and fight Germany and Japan at the same time while the west sits back and watches.
To be fair, everyone that resisted already went to the concentration camps by that time so only the ones who didnt fought were left(you can still blame them) and going publicly against the regime was a death sentence.