As well-meaning publishers try to navigate the coming storm of state laws against diversity, I hope they'll consider Timothy Snyder's Rule #1 (from his slim book ON TYRANNY).
Yep. The trajectory is most often:
- progressive social change
- cishet conservative anxiety over privilege loss
- rising authoritarians promise return to golden age,
- simplify complex social issues into us/them scapegoating,
- insist on suspension of democratic norms to eliminate threat
I'm going to need some proof for this one.
Hitler's rise was not predicated by progressive social change.
Quite the opposite, it happened in the wake of Germany's impoverishment by the debts imposed in the treaty of Versailles.
a lot of resentments built up over the "cosmopolitanism" of Weimar urban cultural revival of the mid-late 1920s not 100% castigating intellectuals, gay and jewish people, for one
sorry, it's right-wing propaganda to... acknowledge the well documented right-wing reactionary position at the time that the democratic republic's culture was "degenerate"? It was not an actually popular/mainstream opinion much less a legitimate one but that Was what the Nazis believed
Okay, so it's not so much that there was social progress in Germany as that the Nazis pushed back against social progress by casting Jewish and homosexual people as "degenerates corrupting pure Germanic culture and blood"?
Jewish people were accepted in and integrated into German society before WWI
which is how many of them had become German bankers and artists and all the other roles in German society Jewish people had before the Nazis started scapegoating Jewish people and discriminating against Jewish people and taking those jobs away from Jewish people.
This article says Jewish people were integrating into German society for a solid hundred years before the Nazi party ever existed, and considering that they had no problem doing so I'd say there wasn't nearly as much antisemitic sentiment then.
www.britannica.com/place/German...
Life expectancy during that period in Germany was only 40 years, so that's definitely multiple generations where Jewish people were able to immigrate into Germany without any major problems (that didn't also apply to everyone else).
www.statista.com/statistics/1...
No the scapegoating definitely was part of the Nazi's platform historically.
You can try to clean it up by blaming the national debt incurred by the treaty of Versailles, but there were a great many people in Germany who were willing to work to pay that debt rather than taking the lazy route of
simply deeming it too hard to repay and cancelling the debt through further warfare as the Nazis proposed.
And tempting as that might have seemed to an impoverished people?
Those people could've looked at how the Nazis discriminated against Jewish people and other Germans not part of the Nazi's
"idealized society" and decided that made supporting them not worth the "national glory" the Nazis promised.
It's not as simple as Germany being in debt. If Germans had adhered to other principles than the ones the Nazis proposed, the Nazis could not have risen to power.
