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[–] 61 points 4 months ago (17 children)

It seems they believe this is satire, but the US did support the rebuilding of Germany after World War II. In this case though, Trump is just a complete idiot, as usual.

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  • [–] 64 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    We didn't pay it to hitler though.

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    Sure but the title of this article doesn't work if you know WW1s lack of nation building/stabilization caused Hitler in the first place.

    In that sense, if we paid Hitler and other vets after WW1, he wouldn't have ended up homeless in a crashed economy and there wouldn't have been a Hitler/WW2 situation.

    That's the big thing that the world learned. Then the US forgot and caused ISIS. So the title is still a fail. Americans need to remember this lesson more than anyone.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Hitler's experience being homeless in Vienna influenced his antisemitic views, but just to be clear, he was homeless prior to WWI.

    After the war he was sent by his military superiors to spy on a German Workers party in 1919, and the leader of the party, Anton Drexler, ended up taking Hitler under his wing. Hitler eventually took over the movement that begun under Drexler, before turning it into the Nazi party. At one point, Hitler threatened to abandon the party unless Drexler handed over complete leadership.

    Drexler remained a party member in name only, and seemed to basically serve as a propaganda tool to help retain pre-nazi membership. For some odd reason Hitler even ended up adopting Drexler's unique little mustache.

    https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/adolf-hitler

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Drexler#CITEREFEvans2003

    So after WWI an already antisemitic Hitler with a reputation in the army as unfit to lead due to psychotic tendencies, felt strongly that Germany had been greatly betrayed. But so did the military superiors who first sent Hitler to spy on Drexler and the Workers party, before eventually ordering him to join the party's leadership when Drexler took an interest.

    Despite his experience in Vienna homeless shelters influencing his antisemitic views, Hitler's superior, and head of German Intelligence's "Education and Propaganda Department," Karl Meyer, was allegedly the person who first instructed Hitler to write about those views.

    As the Nazi party grew, it seems a bit unclear when (if?) Hitler's superiors stopped providing him with official commands/communications, but Meyer would later state that he had been instructed by General Erich Ludendorff to have Hitler join the workers party.

    Ludendorff oversaw virtually all decisions regarding Germany's strategy and war effort until the country's defeat in 1918. Later during the years of the Weimar Republic, he took part in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch and Adolf Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, thereby contributing significantly to the Nazis' rise to power.

    After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader and a promoter of the stab-in-the-back myth, which posited that Germany's defeat and the settlement reached at Versailles were the result of a treasonous conspiracy by Marxists, Freemasons and Jews. He also took part in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch and 1923 Beer Hall Putsch before unsuccessfully standing in the 1925 election for president. Thereafter, he retired from politics and devoted his final years to the study of military theory. His most famous work in this field was The Total War, where he argued that a nation's entire physical and moral resources should remain forever poised for mobilization because peace was merely an interval in a never-ending chain of wars. Following his death from liver cancer in Munich in 1937, Ludendorff was given—against his explicit wishes—a state funeral organized and attended by Hitler.

    TLDR: Is there a chance preventing a German economic crash also could have prevented a Hitler situation/WWII? That's difficult to say.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The last two videos of this playlist seems to suggest that hyper inflation in Germany could have been avoided... and that's a lot of what fueled Hitler's rise:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AM2pncU4rs&list=PLMUzeMKhbl10X-XzH-6q4iU0Ysul7cC4c&index=13

    It's been said "Fascism is Capitalism's immune system".... Hitler used the "Jewish backstabbing" mythology because of the mass poverty. Hitler went after "degenerate culture" in Berlin because mass poverty caused all sorts of sex acts and drugs to be sold as part of the city's underbelly/gray market. According to the documentary below, whole families went into prostitution:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqnnUeD6cw

    I think it's playing it up a bit in that documentary, but I do believe a lot of this stuff related to mass poverty, caused by economic destruction, and a lack of care post WW1. I'm a believer in the theory that fascism is a product of failed economics, and political disenfranchisement. I meant, I might even argue that Donald Trump's first term came off the back of the 2008 financial crisis, and his more recent term came after COVID's economic disruptions.

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  • I'm not disagreeing with about economic disruptions and how anxiety around those disruptions influenced public perception and support leading into WWII.

    Just wondering how long powerful men in the military and government have been manipulating public perception.

    Especially given the stab-in-the-back myth seemed to be Ludenhorff's excuse for Germany's failure under his military leadership following WWI.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    You are assuming that the German populous would follow hitler equally and only hitler would be influenced by the changed economics. The lack of economic opportunity drove Germans towards the right and made Hitler message more appealing

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    I don't think the USA just forgot about it, ISIS was never a real issue, just a anther cause for endless proxy wars, it's a machine that works as intended.

    "Nation building" after WWII wasn't free or benevolent at all (USA or USSR), the tactic was to control the nations instead of letting them regain full independence - as much as/in a form a post-British-empire world can allow imperialism.
    (Israel was a form/consequence of this 'nation building' as well.)

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

    Nation building = funding german rebuilding efforts so they don't go into hyper inflation again.

    Not carving up captured territory. That's not national building.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    One is more literally building a "nation" than the other. I was more pointing out that USA just occupied a territory & stayed there forever.
    (You don't leave your military in a nation after the war is over. Sovereign nations don't allow that. Eg Mexico iirc.)

    Both in their (USA) image.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You don’t leave your military in a nation after the war is over

    Yes you do.

    Sovereign nations don’t allow that.

    The occupied usually surrender territorial control, and all the allied nations stayed in Germany for a number a years... hence the whole east west divide.

    Anyways, I get to say what I meant by Nation Building in my comment. I don't know what you're on about. Are you trying to point out that the US is corrupt? Because buddy, that's already apparent to most people.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    And the Marshal Plan bought the US a tremendous amount of goodwill in Europe, however I don’t think Trump understands the concept of soft power, the way he keeps pissing it away.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The smartest person to have ever existed, Elron Musk, apparently doesn't either. He literally didn't know what USAID did while he was destroying it, motivated by that he wanted to end their investigation into the possible use of missing Starlink terminals by Russia. Members of his admin and maga dorks in general often say "why are we spending money on other countries and not at home??" They're incredibly unaware of how global politics works and generally of other countries at all. Well, not as if Republicans allow taxpayer dollars to be used to help citizens domestically anyway.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    One could argue that USA rebuilt a colony & had vast interest in the region (still has to this day, military personnel & nuclear weapons included). So at best a smart investment that paid for itself several times over.

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