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How did the defeat of the Germans in 1918 help Hitler rise to power?
In an effort to "punish" Germany and prevent the German leadership from considering future war efforts, other nations brought financial sanctions limiting business and hopefully preventing German capabilities of future war. It backfired. The sanctions were too harsh and coupled with the general financial depression of the 30's German citizens suffered even more than many of their European neighbors. Hitler gained popularity by promising prosperity for Germans, blamed much of their condition on the Jews and after getting into power he quietly built a powerful army. He was able to convince Germans that the Aryan race, not just the Caucasians, but a specific sub-group of Caucasians with specific physical characteristics was superior to all others. These he called the "master race". Many of the Germans loved to hear that. It proved what some already believed, and the others wanted to think of themselves as special. Hitler was livid when a black man from the United States won a race in the Olympics. He believed that Germans should have won everything. Members of the NAZI party were not just political ideologues, they were hand picked for matching the Aryan profile. By believing that all others were inferior and therefore less worthy, Germans were justified in their actions. Germans truly believed that they could manage the world far more efficiently. They believed that the Jews would always be greedy and always run the banks and other financial institutions and that the world could not function as long as they lived. NAZI
What role did the colonial militia play in the war?
The traditional mercantilist roles of colonizer and colonies were inverted over the last few decades. For millennia, colonial empires consisted of a center which consumed raw materials and produced and sold finished goods to the periphery whose role was to extract minerals and cultivate commodities, edible and not. In the wake of the Second World War (a failed German colonial experiment in the heartland of Europe) and as a result of escalating scarcity, caused by a variety of economic and geopolitical factors, the center of geopolitical-military gravity shifted to the producers and owners of mineral and agricultural wealth. These countries have outsourced and offshored the manufacturing of semi-finished and finished products to the poorest corners of the Earth. Thus, in stark contrast to the past, nowadays, "colonies" spew out a stream of consumer goods and consume raw materials imported from their colonial masters. Colonial relationships are no longer based on bayonets and are mostly commercial in nature. Still, it is not difficult to discern 19th century patterns in these 21st century exchanges with one of the parties dominant and supreme and the other obsequious and subservient and with the economic benefits flowing and accruing inexorably in one direction. From Venezuela to Thailand, democratic regimes are being toppled by authoritarian substitutes: the military, charismatic left-wingers, or mere populists. Even in the USA, the bastion of constitutional rule, civil and human rights are being alarmingly eroded (though not without precedent in wartime). The prominent ideologues of liberal democracy have committed a grave error by linking themselves inextricably with the doctrine of freemarketry and the emerging new order of globalization. As Thomas Friedman correctly observes in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", both strains of thought are strongly identified with the United States of America (USA). Thus, liberal democracy came to be perceived by the multitudes as a ruse intended to safeguard the interests of an emerging, malignantly narcissistic empire (the USA) and of rapacious multinationals. Liberal democracy came to be identified with numbing, low-brow cultural homogeneity, encroachment on privacy and the individual, and suppression of national and other idiosyncratic sentiments. Liberal democracy came to be confused and confuted with neo-colonial exploitation, social Darwinism, and the crumbling of social compacts and long-standing treaties, both explicit and implicit. It even came to be associated with materialism and a bewildering variety of social ills: rising crime rates, unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, organ trafficking, monopolistic behavior, corporate malfeasance, and other antisocial forms of conduct. The backlash was, thus, inevitable. "Democracy" is not the rule of the people. It is government by periodically vetted representatives of the people. Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of the popular will as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is representative and not participatory. Participatory "people power" is mob rule, not democracy. Granted, "people power" is often required in order to establish democracy where it is unprecedented. Revolutions - velvet, rose, and orange - recently introduced democracy in Eastern Europe, for instance. People power - mass street demonstrations - toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to the Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia. But once the institutions of democracy are in place and more or less functional, the people can and must rest. They should let their chosen delegates do the job they were elected to do. And they must hold their emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every two or four or five years. As heads of the state in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and East Europe can attest, these vital lessons are lost on the dozens of "new democracies" the world over. Many of these presidents and prime ministers, though democratically elected (multiply, in some cases), have fallen prey to enraged and vigorous "people power" movements in their countries. And these breaches of the democratic tradition are not the only or most egregious ones. The West boasts of the three waves of democratization that swept across the world 1975. Yet, in most developing countries and nations in transition, "democracy" is an empty word. Granted, the hallmarks of democracy are there: candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, and voting. But its quiddity is absent. It is being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, intimidation, and collusion with Western interests, both commercial and political. The new "democracies" are thinly-disguised and criminalized plutocracies (recall the Russian oligarchs), authoritarian regimes (Central Asia and the Caucasus), or Vichy-like heterarchies (Macedonia, Bosnia, and Iraq, to mention three recent examples). The new "democracies" suffer from many of the same ills that afflict their veteran role models: murky campaign finances, venal revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise, endemic corruption, self-censoring media, socially, economically, and politically excluded minorities, and so on. But while this malaise does not threaten the foundations of the United States and France - it does imperil the stability and future of the likes of Ukraine, Serbia, and Moldova, Indonesia, Mexico, and Bolivia. Worse still, the West has transformed the ideal of democracy into an ideology at the service of imposing a new colonial regime on its former colonies. Spearheaded by the United States, the white and Christian nations of the West embarked with missionary zeal on a transformation, willy-nilly, of their erstwhile charges into paragons of democracy and good governance. And not for the first time. Napoleon justified his gory campaigns by claiming that they served to spread French ideals throughout a barbarous world. Kipling bemoaned the "White Man's (civilizing) burden", referring specifically to Britain's role in India. Hitler believed himself to be the last remaining barrier between the hordes of Bolshevism and the West. The Vatican concurred with him. This self-righteousness would have been more tolerable had the West actually meant and practiced what it preached, however self-delusionally. Yet, in dozens of cases in the last 60 years alone, Western countries intervened, often by force of arms, to reverse and nullify the outcomes of perfectly legal and legitimate popular and democratic elections. They did so because of economic and geopolitical interests and they usually installed rabid dictators in place of the deposed elected functionaries. This hypocrisy cost them dearly. Few in the poor and developing world believe that the United States or any of its allies are out to further the causes of democracy, human rights, and global peace. The nations of the West have sown cynicism and they are reaping strife and terrorism in return. Moreover, democracy is far from what it is made out to be. Confronted with history, the myth breaks down. For instance, it is maintained by their chief proponents that democracies are more peaceful than dictatorships. But the two most belligerent countries in the world are, by a wide margin, Israel and the United States (closely followed by the United Kingdom). As of late, China is one of the most tranquil polities. Democracies are said to be inherently stable (or to successfully incorporate the instability inherent in politics). This, too, is a confabulation. The Weimar Republic gave birth to Adolf Hitler and Italy had almost 50 governments in as many years. The bloodiest civil wars in history erupted in Republican Spain and, seven decades earlier, in the United States. Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia imploded upon becoming democratic, having survived intact for more than half a century as tyrannies. Democracies are said to be conducive to economic growth (indeed, to be a prerequisite to such). But the fastest economic growth rates in history go to imperial Rome, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and post-Mao China. Finally, how represented is the vox populi even in established democracies? In a democracy, people can freely protest and make their opinions known, no doubt. Sometimes, they can even change their representatives (though the rate of turnover in the US Congress in the last two decades is lower than it was in the last 20 years of the Politburo). But is this a sufficient incentive (or deterrent)? The members of the various elites in Western democracies are mobile - they ceaselessly and facilely hop from one lucrative sinecure to another. Lost the elections as a Senator? How about a multi-million dollar book contract, a consultant position with a firm you formerly oversaw or regulated, your own talk show on television, a cushy job in the administration? The truth is that voters are powerless. The rich and mighty take care of their own. Malfeasance carries little risk and rarely any sanction. Western democracies are ossified bastions of self-perpetuating interest groups aided and abetted and legitimized by the ritualized spectacle that we call "elections". And don't you think the denizens of Africa and Asia and eastern Europe and the Middle East are blissfully unaware of this charade. As the United states is re-discovering in Iraq and Israel in Palestine, maintaining democratic institutions and empire-building are incompatible activities. History repeatedly shows that one cannot preserve a democratic core in conjunction with an oppressed periphery of colonial real estate. The role of imperial power entails the suppression, subversion, or manipulation of all forms of free speech, governance, and elections. It usually involves unsavory practices such as torture, illegal confinement, assassinations, and collusion with organized crime. Empires typically degenerate into an abyss of corruption, megalomaniacal projects, deceit, paranoia, and self-directed aggression. The annals of both Rome and Britain teach us that, as democracy grows entrenched, empires disintegrate fitfully. Rome chose to keep its empire by sacrificing its republic. Britain chose to democratize by letting go of its unwieldy holdings overseas. Both polities failed to uphold their erstwhile social institutions while they grappled with their smothering possessions.
How did Hitler get so many soldiers?
He tried to brain wash all the young people. He started a youth program before the war, and in his speeches attracted the minds of many young people. In schools he forced the teachers to practically brain wash the students.
What has the author Winfried Busse written?
Winfried Busse has written: 'Les Ideologues (Foundations of Semiotics, Vol 12)'
What is feckless pluralism?
The term "feckless pluralism" is a 90% oxymoronic dysphemism most often used by fundamentalist ideologues attempting to discredit the concept of pluralism by inserting an assumption of inherent ineffectiveness.
How does the decline of the cabinet as an advisory body to the president weakens the system of checks and balances?
Because it takes away more objective voices who are also "Subject Matter" experts, and replaces them with partisan ideologues.
Why is evolution controversal?
Evolution, the change in allele frequency over time in a population of organisms is a fact and is only controversial among a vanishingly few ideologues and practically no scientists. The theory of evolution by natural selection is supported by over 95% of all scientists and is not controversial among the scientific community because it has been observed and tested for 150 years. There are some religious ideologues who can not accept the evidences that refute their creation story, so they make evolutionary theory only controversial politically.
Why is evolution so controversal?
Evolution, the change in allele frequency over time in a population of organisms is a fact and is only controversial among a vanishingly few ideologues and practically no scientists. The theory of evolution by natural selection is supported by over 95% of all scientists and is not controversial among the scientific community because it has been observed and tested for 150 years. There are some religious ideologues who can not accept the evidences that refute their creation story, so they make evolutionary theory only controversial politically.
How has diversity caused tension in the middle eastern nations?
When there is diversity, but the governments and religious ideologues believe in only one proper path, there is necessarily tension. Minorities are actively discriminated against in the Middle East by leaders (both political and religious) who favor only the majority population.
Modern presidents have begun to rely less on their cabinets for advice and more on their political advisor how has this weakened the process of checks and balances?
Because it takes away more objective voices who are also "Subject Matter" experts, and replaces them with partisan ideologues.
Is there a controversy over James Watson and Francis Crick?
Only among ideologues, such as radical feminists. The accuse Watson and Crick of " stealing " the elucidation of DNA from Rosalind Franklin. Even though Franklin's work was of inestimable value she was not that close to elucidating the structure of DNA. History has shown, especially with Linus Pauling's success with models, that model building, not X-ray diffraction, was the way to go. Read Gunther Stent for the truth of the matter supposedly controversial.
What is wrong with the Republican Party?
"How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals - ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else's right to govern"From: Paul Krugman at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ref=opinion
What is a true statement regarding Mussolini's rule in Italy?
He took over control of a broken government and economy, and established order and restored a balanced economy. He farmed out his Fascist ideologues who had supported his rise to power into statutory jobs and ruled with a responsible cabinet. Italy came back from the brink of ruin and anarchy under his rule. He acted as a restraint on Adolf Hitler's Germany up to the beginning of World War 2. There was a dark side to him in his personal habits and growing arrogance, however his beneficial rulership should not be submerged in this.
Why did Hilter hated Jewish people?
The Nazis' hatred of the Jews was political and racial, not religious. Some Nazi ideologues claimed that both Judaism and Christianity are 'servile' religions that encourage a sense of sinfulness. They wanted Christianity (in Germany, anyway) to become a 'heroic' religion worshipping Christ as a 'warrior king'. Anyone with even a slight knowledge of Christianity will be aware that this is a complete absurdity.
Why did many Christians call for church reform?
Two answers come to mind, the first being to strip away most of the authority which self proclaimed priests gave to themselves. Second to make the bible available to all citizens so that they could read it for themselves and to be inspired by the Holy Spirit which parts where of much worth to them. A person could have been put to death if found to have a bible in their possession. To a certain extent some of the clergy still hold to these self same ideologues today.
