Posted on 04/09/2014 4:45:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Engineering Evil" is a documentary recently shown on the Military History channel. It's a story of Nazi Germany's murder campaign before and during World War II. According to some estimates, 16 million Jews and other people died at the hands of Nazis (http://tinyurl.com/6duny9).
Though the Holocaust ranks high among the great human tragedies, most people never consider the most important question: How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazis gain the power that they needed to commit such horror? Focusing solely on the evil of the Holocaust won't get us very far toward the goal of the Jewish slogan "Never Again."
When Hitler came to power, he inherited decades of political consolidation by Otto von Bismarck and later the Weimar Republic that had weakened the political power of local jurisdictions. Through the Enabling Act (1933), whose formal name was "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich," Hitler gained the power to enact laws with neither the involvement nor the approval of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. The Enabling Act destroyed any remaining local autonomy. The bottom line is that it was decent Germans who made Hitler's terror possible -- Germans who would have never supported his territorial designs and atrocities.
The 20th century turned out to be mankind's most barbaric. Roughly 50 million to 60 million people died in international and civil wars. As tragic as that number is, it pales in comparison with the number of people who were killed at the hands of their own government. Recently deceased Rudolph J. Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and author of "Death by Government," estimated that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have killed 170 million of their own citizens. Top government killers were the Soviet Union, which, between 1917 and 1987, killed 62 million of its own citizens, and the People's Republic of China, which, between 1949 and 1987, was responsible for the deaths of 35 million to 40 million of its citizens. In a distant third place were the Nazis, who murdered about 16 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others deemed misfits, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill.
We might ask why the 20th century was so barbaric. Surely, there were barbarians during earlier ages. Part of the answer is that during earlier times, there wasn't the kind of concentration of power that emerged during the 20th century. Had Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hitler been around in earlier times, they could not have engineered the slaughter of tens of millions of people. They wouldn't have had the authority. There was considerable dispersion of jealously guarded political power in the forms of heads of provincial governments and principalities and nobility and church leaders whose political power within their spheres was often just as strong as the monarch's.
Professor Rummel explained in the very first sentence of "Death by Government" that "Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. ... The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects." That's the long, tragic, ugly story of government: the elite's use of government to dupe and forcibly impose its will on the masses. The masses are always duped by well-intentioned phrases. After all, what German could have been against "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"? It's not just Germans who have fallen prey to well-intentioned phrases. After all, who can be against the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"?
We Americans ought to keep the fact in mind that Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have had more success in their reign of terror if they had the kind of control and information about their citizens that agencies such as the NSA, the IRS and the ATF have about us. You might ask, "What are you saying, Williams?" Just put it this way: No German who died before 1930 would have believed the Holocaust possible.
“How to Assist Evil”...
Simple answer, Vote Democrat.
Simple, do what they did in Germany, vote for the socialist party that promises you free stuff from other people.
Then when the other people hide their stuff you load them up in trucks and trains and take them to the forest and re-educate them with a shot to the head.
Then you are free to collect their stuff, steal what you want and give the other stuff to your friends.
Oh, don’t forget to act surprised when the people you voted for to give you free stuff them come and take you away for re-education.
I meant, the King James version...
Scarey post, but true. The fight has to begin to keep this from happening. The current regime is getting more dangerous by the day.
I do not see a good ending for anyone.
Recently? I did not know ... Rest in Peace, Dr. Rummel. His work should be required reading.
Williams, as usual, is spot on. Among the degrees I have is one in Germanic languages, which means I had to read a lot of German literature. Williams is correct when he says that the average German of 1930, if told of the coming Holocaust, would have said “that can’t happen here.” But by 1955, when they were ready to confront their legacy, they all asked “how could we have let this happen?” And that was the dominant theme in all German culture at least through the mid 1980s .
When I went to law school in 1981, my Civil Procedure professor turned one lecture over to a Holocaust survivor, who told us what he had to do to be the only member of his familiy to survive Auschwitz. When the presentation was over, Professor Harvey took the podium and all he said was “Your duty as lawyers is to make sure this never happens again.”
I could tell from the comments of my classmates afterwards that their consensus was “That can’t happen here.”
BTTT
wow, she can be bought cheap
“How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazis gain the power that they needed to commit such horror?”
Ask Obama - he’ll cite you chapter and verse.
Mark
This was a half-baked article.
First, up until 1919...Prussia-Germany was run by the Kaiser, and the Chancellor was simply a “toy” that the Kaiser used to dictate direction. The Prussian military staff around the Kaiser generally dictated government policy and what generally occurred about once every five years was some bone of social order change...enough to make people think change was in the wind, but never much.
After 1919....no Kaiser and the political mechanism simply wasn’t mature enough or capable enough to grasp the fundamentals of running a government. Toss in chaos from the Communists around the country, economic despair which they weren’t prepared for, and hostile veteran feelings left from the war....and you got yourself a open door for some one-star marginal speech-maker to be Chancellor.
It was only three years into the Hitler era....that his economic adviser woke up and realized that they were going to be unable to pay the “gifts” they offered, and run an simple-essentials-only government mechanism, along with the military machine.
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