If you could point me to other speeches laying out the Nazi domestic story differently, I'd appreciate it. I picked the Sportpalastrede because (a) it was what we'd read in school, (b) it comes at a critical point, after Rokossovsky had cut off the Nazis from middle eastern oil, and just before the Nazis go explicitly totalitarian, and (c) even though they'd basically lost momentum, the Nazis would go on to be even more cruel to even more people for a few years more. I don't believe that Max Mustermann would have given the consent of the governed[1] in 1933 for "we're going to conquer everyone and kill millions of undesirables", but "we're going to support our traditions, defend the church, and create a brilliant future for our children", despite being a different end approached by the same means, was probably a much easier sale.
"...going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection." was intended to be read exactly as "conquer rest of west". Sorry, often I fail to realise most people are not as cynical as I.
So, moving on to where I believe we differ:
> "takes responsibility away from those in power, away from those who seek power and places it on ambiguous faceless mass"
is exactly the point I'm arguing. I would say the implosion of the USSR is encouraging, because it shows us that people not in power can change the behaviour of those in power, when they are willing to say together, "you know, this system, it doesn't actually promote the ideals we were all taught to believe in." (Yes, it likely helped immensely that Gorbi himself also seems to have believed in his childhood picture of what socialism was supposed to have been. Also, in the case of both of us[2], we belong to this mass despite being neither ambiguous nor faceless.)
I think asking people in power (especially people who sought power for its own sake) to be responsible is to ignore those thousands of years of history Goebbels claimed to be preserving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846415
Can you suggest a better method for avoiding self-interested leaders than the hypnopaedic suggestions of Brave New World or the arbitrariness of sortition?
(Go back a few hundred years, and one can find plenty of people willing to argue that monarchy is superior to democracy, as the identification of the monarch with the state means that the monarch is more likely to act with long term interests in mind. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184621 )
Anyway, where we seem to differ is where best to address the problem of potential totalitarianism: with the many, or with the few? I believe it very difficult with the former, and impossible[3] with the latter.
How do you see it?
[1] compare Linebarger's Psychological Warfare, in the context of hot war, not peaceful political process:
"the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546
[2] Going by the odds, it is reasonable to bet that you are also not in power, please correct me if I'm mistaken.
[3] Even Plato thinks that to address it among the latter, they can't be allowed family or property, or even private meals.