What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler | Hacker News Reader

What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler

theatlantic.com

46 pointscyberlurker32 comments

We presume that things that have been stable for hundreds of years will continue to be stable by just some sheer force of history. This is a falsehood.

> The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's law) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age.

Implying an memoryless distribution (eg exponential) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorylessness

In the absence of other information it might be as good a basis as any?

Honestly? Your comment makes me feel like I'm in a Curb your enthusiasm show.

Except I'm not and much more clever people are working this brand new world, and I really hope they get it right.

haha give it a few years and you will want a non Earth hacker news :)

this planet is rotten to the core if someone figures out space travel try scarcity/hierarchy deconditioning for 1k generations and relocate and try elsewhere maybe?

but earth can't be fixed forget HN

Earth is fine. US is obviously currently not fine.

Heh. It's ridiculous to believe that this only changed with the new administratoon.

More likely outcome (at least short-medium term for the next [premature] election) is the return to the status quo. It works as follows: when population is starting to see through your BS, make things much worse so that people will long for how things were before. Much less likely outcome is “little man” becoming the great dictator. Though it is a win-win for people with the real power either way.

Honestly I'm getting pretty worried. We just had the current administration sell a bunch of young men into slavery in a El Salvador (they will be doing forced hard labor) then openly state in a court filings that they had no evidence of these men committing crimes, and still MAGA seems fine with this.

I don't know that there's anything Trump can do at this point that will lose him support.

How did MAGA become so rabid during the last administration???

I'm not American but try to be a neutral observer. Obviously the polarized media didn't help but there were a couple or reasonable issues. One the border - apparently there were more illegals turning up than US citizens being born and the Biden admin seemed determined to let it go on to the extent that you did have gangs of South American criminals taking over. That bunch sent to El Salvador probably were 95% illegal immigrant criminal gang members and it's not that outrageous to kick them out, although more due process would be a good thing.

Also the whole trans thing - to the majority of people guys thinking they are girls is a bit weird and doing surgery on kids on that basis probably a bad idea. But the dems not only promoted that but the idea you should be cancelled or lose your job if you spoke what you thought. I mean I would have been tempted to vote them out although I'm not right wing.

> probably were

Do you not see the problem with this? We aren't talking revoking a Visa, we're talking a lifetime of slavery.

> illegal immigrant

Many explicitly were in the country legally. The administration is not claiming they were in the country illegally.

> criminal gang members

Who the administration says in court they have no evidence of commiting any crimes.

> kick them out

They were not "kicked out". They were sent to slave labor in El Salvador.

> We just had the current administration sell a bunch of young men into slavery in a El Salvador.

El Salvador has different prison systems for gang members and for other convicts. The prison they were sent to has a higher security level and is more strict, so they don't participate in the work program.

You can't have return to status quo. Too much of checks and balances were already destroyed. Even if people started to long for what was before, which is something conservative people just don't yet, it would be impossible now.

President can be lawless and can retaliate hard toward his opposition. Supreme court approved that. That is reality now. It means Republicans can't allow opposition to get power again else they will be in the dame danger ... and it means there will be no real opposition.

When the party can destroy companies that sued them and fire regulators that forced their company obey the law at least a little, the game is lost.

I bet that's what a lot of people thought in 1933 as well.

https://archive.is/gjkNq

After reading this article read up on the constitutional flaws in the Weimar Republic. It is fascinating to see how a country can be ultimately brought down by its own legal structure if it's not designed well.

It is something else to see it happen in real-time.

Like a month ago I was defending e.g. Musk against uninformed attacks online.

Yes. Constitutional change or emergency decrees are a fundamental threat to democracy. I read an article last week from a fscking dean of law from Berkeley arguing that we should hold a constitutional convention so we could sneak in an abolition of the constitution.

I fear we are in a world where we’re are simply going to be rotating dictators every 4-8 years unless power is reclaimed from government.

Great article. One classic lesson here is, “Don’t underestimate your opponent.” A powerful opponent is one where they are aware they are being underestimated.

Everyone thought he was a “comical figure”. A lot of people said Trump wouldn’t win. Well, they were a bit surprised.

The scary thing this time is that more women voters and more democrats needed to get out and vote for Harrison. Failed opportunity. The second scary thing is we see everything happening in real-time with all the knowledge of the past and those in power aren’t doing enough. Second failed opportunity.

At what point do we fight or flee?

The frustrating thing is our elected and appointed officials should have been fighting this furiously. Jan 6th should have resulted in actual consequences.

I read another article by this author recently it wasn’t impressed, but this is a pretty impressive piece.

The one thing I wish the author went into is the piece: Why is it that people dismissed Hitler with their stereotype of “the small man“ ?

I would argue that it was because of confirmation biases and an overwhelming sense that everyone saw the world the same way that they did, and anyone who did not was not worth taking seriously. They saw the benefits of individual rights, liberalism and socialism.

This is especially important because Hitler’s appeal was rooted and rejecting the international order. Rejecting how far Europe in general, and Germany in particular had fallen.

He saw how the economic order that was so catastrophic to the Germans and connected with Germans who were already disenchanted with liberal and press elites.

The fact that he really did not have any solutions other than scapegoating and war for each of those things didn’t really matter because he saw and tapped into anger that others ignored. That made them adore him.

I think the Hitler and Trump comparisons are catastrophic bad and misplaced (you can easily convince me of more parallels to Mussolini) - but in this sense, I think ithe comparison here makes easier to understand why Trump supporters see the bile and disregard that the media and political opponents as badges of honor - they increase, not decrease their adoration of him.

Trump is a constant reminder that it has almost always been easier to build a fanatical following based on mutual hatred then mutual love.

"You hate X? I hate X too".

Welcome to the last 28 years of American political parties. Hating republicans/democrats has been the single simply rallying cry of our political system since George H Bush left office.

And burning crosses on front lawns brings people together like nothing else.

German elites were not liberal nor internationally focused. What are you going on in here. German elites were conservative and generally aristocratic pro-monarchy leaning.

Hitlers program went very much beyond scapegoating - he demanded more land for Germans as in more "living space". He demanded to build stron nation

Oh, he has seen empathy as weakness, word as competition where winners have no responsibility to loosers. Musk and other conservative representatives nazi salute are perfectly fitting.

Trump never laughs because it makes him look weak.

You seem to think the monarchists were the only elites. The three parties in control - the catholic center party, the SPD and others were relatively liberal and associated with the Weimar government.

The monarchists did not have any real power until the last dying days of the Weimar Republic - which violence between the communists (who had split from the SPD after the failed revolutions) and nazis had accelerated dramatically. (Along with the collapse of international finance and easy American loans).

It was the collapse of the three parties that led to the rise of the militarists (not necessarily monarchists) and ultimately to Hitler.

Sources - Richard Evan’s three volume history of nazi germany is great.

I read the same book and liberal elites were ot a thing in that book. Seriously.

The goverment workers were ex-soldiers, leaning right and supporting dictatorship. Judges, cops and prosecutors were leaning right and much more lenient to the right. Country leadership were former aristocracy and pro monarchy. Journals belonged to parties, each having own.

There was real communist uprising, having nothing to do with the only pro democratic party social democrats. Which was NOT elite and more of middle class thing.

Social democrats did not collapsed until Hitler took power and imprisoned them in amos right as he took power. And that last election was quite violent, with a lot of violence from the nazi side and a lot of attempts to tie communists to social democrats. Hitler did not had to win, altrought he did.

I would (humbly) suggest you look a the state of the government during the entire Weimar period, not just the end. Here is a list of the Chancellors during that period:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chancellors_of_Germany...

The Centre Party, the SPD, the GPP dominated that period - they all recognized the weimar government, human rights, liberal economics.

(BTW, it's not one book - it's a trilogy of books).

I read this and it offers no lessons at all. Just seems to be a retelling of the history. So the title of this article seems like click bait, unless I missed something.

The title is "What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler", and the majority of the piece is about German and foreign press consistently mocking and underestimating him even as he rose to power. It seems like the title and article are pretty well-aligned here.

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