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Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

Having recently watched Triumph of the Will[1] I have to admit I'm reassured by the impression that US reactionary extremists, at least the goofier part of them as revealed by indictments, just plain lack teutonic thoroughness.

Example: before the Nazis came to power, what would become the brownshirts had disguised themselves as a gymnastics and sport group (Turn- und Sportabteilung), not as a "we carry in tacticool" group.

[1] somewhere after 32:00, what I believe to be the sauce for "I'm doing my part!"

~48:16, Hitler stans Sparta, "we will die, but germany will live on in you".

Bonus satire: https://local.theonion.com/man-with-20-rifles-can-t-remember...

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24389335 , which I wrote after reading about guys similar to these, neither of whom appear to have considered that any "Hamas" agent who desperately needed a couple of farmboys to machine silencers might just be sus.

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Post WWI Germany was in a much worse state economically than the US currently is. Consequently, there were far more people who were capable of that kind of planning who also weren’t invested in the status quo.

It's not just economics there. Weimar was a garbage fire from top to bottom, and that made extremist groups that promised to fix the nation actually viable. People are much more willing to vote for loons if everything is broken and no one has really done much of substance about it. In their eyes they have nothing to lose. A common thought then was "Maybe these nazi/communist/anarchist guys can fix things. They seem well organised even if they are a bit wacky. How could they make things worse? We'll just vote them out if they don't deliver the goods like we did the last guys".

Little did they know of what was to come.

For reference, what a german ballot looked like by 1936: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_German_parliamentary_elec...

November 1933 was already similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...

and March 1933 was highly irregular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...

> "In a decree issued on 17 February 1933, Göring ordered the Prussian police force to make unrestrained use of firearms in operations against political opponents" and (as mentioned in previous posts) the police were not the only armed paramilitary group in play.

One additional item of context is that there were many people (including Ezra Pound and Oswald Spengler) going about saying that WWI+depression had proved that the edwardian vision of progress and social democracy was broken forever, and something new needed to be tried.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696859

I agree with the sibling comment that post-WW1 was a different place, but I'll add that from the reading I've done Hitler and his cronies were so much worse at their stuff than the 'tactical genius evil' the Nazis are often presented as being.

So maybe it was just a matter of having enough of these 'dumb' types and and some of them learning over time? I could see that happening if the US keeps increasing the number of these types of people.

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