Yeah seeing the same seems somewhat legit
seems like hopium but maybe?
Seems like someone would have picked it up by now so I’m going with no.
Shit like this makes my blood boil
Heck yeah, Midwest stays frugal.
Lots of bangers in here:
Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
The popular picture of the decline of the Weimar Republic—in which hyperinflation produced mass unemployment, which produced an unstoppable wave of fascism—is far from the truth. The hyperinflation had ended in 1923, and the period right afterward, in the mid-twenties, was, in Germany as elsewhere, golden. The financial crash of 1929 certainly energized the parties of the far left and the far right. Still, the results of the July, 1932, election weren’t obviously catastrophic. The Nazis came out as the largest single party, but both Hitler and Goebbels were bitterly disappointed by their standing. The unemployed actually opposed Hitler and voted en masse for the parties of the left. Hitler won the support of self-employed people, who were in decent economic shape but felt that their lives and livelihoods were threatened; of rural Protestant voters; and of domestic workers (still a sizable group), perhaps because they felt unsafe outside a rigid hierarchy. What was once called the petite bourgeoisie, then, was key to his support—not people feeling the brunt of economic precarity but people feeling the possibility of it. Having nothing to fear but fear itself is having something significant to fear.
Ryback spends most of his time with two pillars of respectable conservative Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher and the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. Utterly contemptuous of Hitler as a lazy buffoon—he didn’t wake up until eleven most mornings and spent much of his time watching and talking about movies—the two men still hated the Communists and even the center-left Social Democrats more than they did anyone on the right, and they spent most of 1932 and 1933 scheming to use Hitler as a stalking horse for their own ambitions.
Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a nice feeling for the black comedy of the period. He makes much sport of the attempts by foreign journalists resident in Germany, particularly the New York Times’ Frederick T. Birchall, to normalize the Nazi ascent—with Birchall continually assuring his readers that Hitler, an out-of-his-depth simpleton, was not the threat he seemed to be, and that the other conservatives were far more potent in their political maneuvering. When Papen made a speech denying that Hitler’s paramilitary forces represented “the German nation,” Birchall wrote that the speech “contained dynamite enough to change completely the political situation in the Reich.” On another occasion, Birchall wrote that “the Hitlerites” were deluded to think they “hold the best cards”; there was every reason to think that “the big cards, the ones that will really decide the game,” were in the hands of people such as Papen, Hindenburg, and, “above all,” Schleicher.
Ryback, focussing on the self-entrapped German conservatives, generally avoids the question that seems most obvious to a contemporary reader: Why was a coalition between the moderate-left Social Democrats and the conservative but far from Nazified Catholic Centrists never even seriously attempted? Given that Hitler had repeatedly vowed to use the democratic process in order to destroy democracy, why did the people committed to democracy let him do it?
Many historians have jousted with this question, but perhaps the most piercing account remains an early one, written less than a decade after the war by the émigré German scholar Lewis Edinger, who had known the leaders of the Social Democrats well and consulted them directly—the ones who had survived, that is—for his study. His conclusion was that they simply “trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters.” The Social Democratic leadership had become a gerontocracy, out of touch with the generational changes beneath them. The top Social Democratic leaders were, on average, two decades older than their Nazi counterparts.
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Bingo.
The people who called Hitler a clown but preferred him over leftist parties weren’t “respectable conservatives,” they were nazis
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Anybody that wasn’t anti-Hitler was nazi. Still true today.
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All conservatives are nazis.
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One of the weird things to think about in this timeline is that the major European powers were all fine to let Hitler take over most of Central Europe too. The world looks very different in a timeline where Germany never invades France or Russia.
Just another thing that shows how far even foreign powers are willing to let someone like this go. You see a little bit of this today with some of the foreign sentiment that says why don’t we just let Putin take Ukraine?
The Baltimore bridge thing made me (and I’m sure a lot of other people around here) think of this:
Cliffs is that the freighter hit the bridge and broke it badly enough that it was unusable. A larger bridge that was high enough for big ships to pass underneath was built as a result.
One bizarre coda to the story: The guy who was driving the ship was murdered by his wife some years later.
My solution is more guillotine-y.
obscene that congress finally gets the chutzpah to regulate social media and fucks up by only singling out one company
BlackRock CEO basically says we need to make sure half of workers die before getting Social Security benefits, which would be a retirement age around 78 (he doesn’t say the number, I checked an actuarial table). Or maybe Yahoo took him way out of context, I dunno.
Fink, who is worth an estimated $1.2 billion, notes that many 65-year-olds in the early 1950s didn’t get a chance to retire because many had already passed away. In other words, he writes, more than half of workers who had paid into Social Security never got a penny because they died before they could claim the benefit.
“Today, these demographics have completely unraveled, and this unraveling is obviously a wonderful thing,” Fink added. “We should want more people to live more years. But we can’t overlook the massive impact on the country’s retirement system.”
Confirms my long held belief that brisket is a symbol of oppression. No reason to make it instead of pork if you want bbq.
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