Allanea wrote:Gallia- wrote:Does this mean the USA is a huge idiot led moronocracy because it lost the world?
The most accurate statement is that Hitler's Reich started out competent and gradually became less competent as it was clouded by early successes in its decision making, culminating in eventual defeat around 1942 when the USA entered the war. That doesn't detract from its early success in the slightest, that just points out the folly of having so much information weighed on a small circle of individuals. Had Hitler stopped at the Sudetenland, the Third Reich would probably still exist in some form today.
The problem with this idea is that having so much information weighed on a small circle of individuals is at the core of what the Third Reich believed in, and equally, vast territorial expansion is at the core of Mein Kampf, even at an age when sheer territorial expansion was becoming less and less important economically.
In reality, Hitler and his cronies came into possession of a country with a strong industrial and military tradition, and a strongly nationalistic culture, as well as a literary and philosophical tradition that could be put into service of a nationalist upheaval. In other words, it was much like a gang of meth-using, cousin-humping racists with bad teeth breaking into a National Guard armory.
Well, literally a gang of meth-using cousin-humping racists. In Hitler's case - literally with bad teeth.
They then used the cultural and social weapons they had found there to fight everyone else, and predictably lost. It should be noted that fighting everyone else was a spectacularly bad idea on the level of performing a pirouette atop a speeding train for Youtube likes.
I can climb on top of a speeding train, and if I am good at ballet, I may perform several, extremely technically well-executed, wonderful pirouettes up there. Possibly the video of me performing a pirouette in a ballerina dress as I get face-slammed by an electric pole at 100 MPH will get 10 million likes and go viral. But that is not competence as most people know it.
Since you asked me to comment on this for some reason, I agree except to say that the background of the Nazis was mostly upper middle class, just like that of other revolutionaries, and their revolution was carried out very competently.
