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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

This situation we're in is making me really uneasy. WW2 was preceded by tariffs and a freezing of global trade, which messed up the German economy too much, pushed it into an inflationary debt crisis and eventually created Nazism. Nazism was a response to a perceived foreign threat that "did a lot of damage to our people, and it's time for us to be the best".

Say the trade war ends up badly and the Chinese debt bubble pops. How easily can the mainlanders be convinced that it's "the West", in particular America, fucking with them, as they already believe is the case in Hong Kong protests. Then collectively mobilize into a military response, starting a process that will take tens of millions of lives.

We're all people, please never forget that. The single thing all of us want is not to be drafted into the military and give our lives in a service of some dogma, bleeding out to death on a street in some remote corner of the world.

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> We're all people, please never forget that. The single thing all of us want is not to be drafted into the military and give our lives in a service of some dogma, bleeding out to death on a street in some remote corner of the world.

That’s cool, but I think the people in HK want to live too. If the fear of upsetting someone always prevented us from acting when warranted we wouldn’t get anywhere.

Let's not forget that the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic was, in large part, intentional. They printed money to pay the Versailles reparations, and to inflate them away. Obviously it escalated out of control, but they weren't mere innocent victims of external events.

Serious debt crises are always eventually handled by printing money. Or, more precisely, the crises keep on going till the authorities decide to print money. It is only a question of "when". This can happen in a variety of ways, for example in the Great Depression it was handled by devaluing the dollar against the gold (Executive Order 6102 and the follow ups), in 2008 it was handled by QE.

There is such a thing as excessive money printing, though.

See Ray Dalio's book "Principles for navigating big debt crises" which analyzes 48 debt crises across the world, a few of them in great detail and establishes a general framework of the way those play out.

In a sense all hyperinflations are voluntary because a key part of the dynamic is governments creating truly vast amount of new money.

That being said, the Treaty of Versailles was said to be a pretty obviously punitive treaty. Famously quoted as a "Carthaginian peace" [0]. The Germans needed a party that would stand up and say they weren't going to try and honour the treaty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

Certainly. It was the French, particularly Foch who insisted on punitive, and later claimed it was too lenient. Keynes wrote a famous book "On the Consequences of Peace" roundly criticising the settlement. Essentially Versailles set in train the events that led to WW2, Nazi party notwithstanding.

Ironically toward the end of WW2, the Americans promoted the Morgenthau Plan that would have barred Germany from nearly all industry, putting them back to an agrarian age and made Versailles look relatively trivial. It almost certainly extended the war. Thankfully once it became widely known it was replaced with the Marshall Plan.

The German series "Babylon Berlin" [1] is a fictive series about the Weimar Republic before the Nazis got to power.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is apparently also about Berlin the 1920s. It is from 1980, by famous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The entire miniseries is ~15,5 hours long. I have yet to see it before my death...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alexanderplatz_(miniser...

Berlin Alexanderplatz is definitely worth the investment of time if you have any interest in modern German history and culture. Less time than "Breaking Bad" or "The Walking Dead."

And Babylon Berlin is also well worth it - great mise-en-scène, recreation of the time and place (I think... wasn't there :-) and a captivating police/thriller/extortion/revolution story.

And it introduces a bit of the political background (the rise of both the communists and the fascists and their assault on the republic), but not annoyingly so.

Germany lost WWI and as part of the peace treaty Germany got the sole blame for it via Treaty of Versailles [1].

I learned at elementary school, if two have a fight, there's two to blame. Never one party. Though the reasoning might not be obvious; it could very well be obfuscated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

Luckily the WW2 fallout was handled more gracefully by both sides (no huge penalties imposed by the Allies, a full acknowledgement of the responsibility for the crimes by the Germans). And the world prospered.

>Let's not forget that the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic was, in large part, intentional. They printed money to pay the Versailles reparations, and to inflate them away.

Interestingly there's been a lot of talk of central banks in EU and US encouraging people to anticipate negative interest rates soon (actually these already happen in the EU even in strong economies like Germany).

Also, back then you had the punitive Versailles treaty making Germans mad. Though perhaps a uniquely US phenomenon the same sort of bankers have been saddling large swaths of the Millennial generation with six-figure student loan debt that can't be forgiven. Don't get me wrong, my own debt just barely hits 5 figures and I do well for my family, we are saving for a house so I don't want inflation to eat our savings away, but I feel today's society caters to the sort of people that have six figure student loan debt (the emotional support animal generation) and so some type of mass loan forgiveness or massive inflation is inevitable.

Coincidentally the social revolutions today are very similar to social innovations going on in the lead up to the rise of the NSDAP. However, I think the state has a lot more surveillance technology to crush any sort of resistance on that front.

Weren't reparations specified in Gold marks to specifically address concerns of inflating away the debt?

They were specified in gold value, but payment was accepted in gold, cash, commodities, stock and bonds, and even manufactured goods I think. I think cash was only restricted fairly late on in the reparation payments - mid 1920s at a guess, i.e. after the hyperinflation.

Nobody is waging war against China over HK. There may be blood shed but that'll be the HK locals', not any foreign nation. I don't see how this could anyhow escalate beyond HK.

China can hate the USA as much as they want but from all I can see they have no intentions on waging war with the US over something as minor as HK is for them.

> pushed it into an inflationary debt crisis and eventually created Nazism

The hyperinflation of the early 20s has a lot of sticking power in the mind, but it was the severe deflationary crisis of 1929-32 that immediately preceded the rise of Nazism.

The hyperinflation helped create the chaos and sense of social disorder that made the Nazis' appeals to tradition so powerful for a certain segment of society. I don't think they would have been able to gain such broad tacit support without that chaos and the fear it created. That support was already in place when the financial pendulum swung the other way.

>We're all people, please never forget that. The single thing all of us want is not to be drafted into the military and give our lives in a service of some dogma, bleeding out to death on a street in some remote corner of the world.

There's a hell of a lot of people out there that would risk their lives for other people's freedom. You might not personally know any (they don't tend to come from the kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds that most of HN comes from) but they're there.

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