RE: How We Become Obedient Sheep Without Realizing It

[ocrdu]

Not fundamental to what you are saying, but the "There is little evidence to support the view that Hitler received substantial financial support from big business" you quote is untrue. Big business, and also the upper classes, were more scared of the communists than of Hitler, and big business saw some nice opportunities.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_1933 for Hitler's financing by big business.

"The Nazis won their support primarily from the lower middle class and the peasantry. These voters were strongly nationalistic in their political views and feared that the depression would deprive them of their standard of living." is also doubtful. The depression had already deprived them of their standard of living, and not just the lower middle class, but the whole middle class was a good source for Nazi votes. It wasn't all about nationalism, but also about jobs.

Comments

[stellabelle]

I will look into it. What I was researching was how the Nazi party first began to gain power and from the very beginning stages, it appears that

Brüning hoped the 1930 election would provide a moderate right wing vote from which he could form a government. What he got was a Nazi party which gained nearly six and a half million votes. This gave them 107 seats and made them the second largest party. These gains were partly the result of falls among the middle class and rural parties, whose voters Hitler had successfully targeted, and partly the result of the Nazis tapping into the ‘right versus Weimar’ feeling to attract a mass of votes. Hitler promised many things to many different people, with tailored posters and rhetoric for every class and group (anti-Semitism would go unmentioned if the audience were unreceptive), gaining a cross class vote. He also held the party together when most others splintered through sheer force of personal image.
http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/germanyandprussia/fl/The-Fall-of-Weimar-and-the-Nazi-Acquisition-of-Power.htm

People were attracted to Nazi ideas while being driven away from the failures and fears of Weimar, and Hitler, aided by Goebbels, knew the value of propaganda and used a large range of targeted campaigns to appeal to different groups. Many classes of voter were presented with promises which seemed to speak directly to them, and this was deliberate. From posters to radio, from Hitler’s ‘Flight over Germany’ to the power of the mass rally, the Nazis were ahead of the game. But it was insidious, as while the virtues of Hitler and his party were built up, turning Hitler into a messianic figure who would use revolution to restore past glories, the Nazis built their campaign by turning other groups into enemies to be crushed, chiefly the November Criminals, the Communists and the Jews. The latter was an easy target thanks to several millennia of European anti-Semitism. In addition, the SA and an expanded SS – numbers swollen by unemployed youth – waged a campaign of violence to ‘dissuade’ their targets and promote the Nazis. Hitler, still trying to act legally, sometimes lost control of this street war, and everyone in Germany knew of the violence.

[professorx]

Reading this worries me because we may very well see street wars. As Trump's economic policies favor the billionaire class and more lower middle class white folks become unemployed, they will blame immigrants even more with egging on by Trump in this regard. It becomes a vicious cycle. Even if the economy tanks, he won't lose that population he won over in 2016: they will become more dedicated to him and the race wars will grow. Trump will stoke these fires.