Would blaming Hitler for the Holocaust be a case of ''The Great Man Theory''?

[Gileson]

I ask since according to Pinker's Better Angels, Hitler was ''mostly responsible'' for the Holocaust.

Also, has there ever been a Marxist approach to Nazi Germany's atrocities?

[Comrade #138672]

Yes, there are several Marxist approaches to the understanding of fascism. Some more controversial than others.

For example, Gramsci analyzed fascism mainly on a superstructural level. While I would not necessarily call it un-Marxist, I think Marxism ought to be more materialist.

Then there is Bordiga's analysis of fascism, which is undoubtedly the most controversial understanding of fascism. Some even call his analysis anti-Semitic, but I think these people are missing the point Bordiga was trying to make. Bordiga's analysis is at least rooted in materialist thought, although some Marxists accuse him of vulgar materialism.

I would say Trotsky fits in between those extremes. He had a lot to say about fascism and called it "capitalism in decay". Furthermore, he recognized that the petty bourgeoisie was the social base for the development of fascism, under very specific conditions. He also stressed the need for a strong united left to combat fascism. Also, Trotsky was able to predict the Holocaust accurately.

[Rurkel]

When it comes to the Holocaust, mainstream non-Marxist historians agree that Hitler has some responsibility for it, but its underlying reason and its genesis are causes of disagreement. "Intentionalists" consider Hitler's long-lasting desire to exterminate the Jews to be the main factor, while "functionalists" emphasis the on-the-ground 'initiatives' of low and middle-low level Nazi bosses and administrators in the mass murder's genesis, although they do not deny that these administrators were spurned on by the anti-Jewish rhetorics and that Hitler personally was aware of what's going on.

Steve Pinker is usually completely facile and wrong.

[Creative Destruction]

Yes, there are several Marxist approaches to the understanding of fascism. Some more controversial than others.

For example, Gramsci analyzed fascism mainly on a superstructural level. While I would not necessarily call it un-Marxist, I think Marxism ought to be more materialist.

Then there is Bordiga's analysis of fascism, which is undoubtedly the most controversial understanding of fascism. Some even call his analysis anti-Semitic, but I think these people are missing the point Bordiga was trying to make. Bordiga's analysis is at least rooted in materialist thought, although some Marxists accuse him of vulgar materialism.

I would say Trotsky fits in between those extremes. He had a lot to say about fascism and called it "capitalism in decay". Furthermore, he recognized that the petty bourgeoisie was the social base for the development of fascism, under very specific conditions. He also stressed the need for a strong united left to combat fascism. Also, Trotsky was able to predict the Holocaust accurately.

what is Bordiga's analysis?

[Os Cangaceiros]

There was actually an interesting discussion recently about the "intentionalist" vs "non intentionalist" debate. As someone mentioned, there seems to be a problem with the intentionalist position in that killing all the jews wouldve been something hitler wouldve wanted to do on day one once he achieved power, but in fact the term "final solution" implies that the nazis had contemplated other strategies besides outright extermination. Although I would probably argue that the whole cult of the fuhrer combined with hitler's personal anti semitism did contribute somewhat to what eventually transpired.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem made it sound like quite a bit of effort was expended on the part of the Nazis in trying to deport Jews as an initial 'solution'. However the ease and speed at which the policy was changed to extermination also makes it seem as if it had been something that had always been a realistic option for the regime.

Edit: to add to this as it's been a couple years since I've read it. I believe the deportation option had actually only been reserved for German Jews specifically. The books doesn't go into a whole lot of detail on the subject, but the German public seemed to have different feelings toward German Jews vs. other Jewish populations in places like Poland. Eichmanns whole defense rested on his assertion that he was actually desperate to save Jews through deportation, which suggests that he must have known the alternative would have been mass death sentences.

[Rafiq]

To simply blame Hitler would be even more of an obscenity. The horror of the holocaust was simply that there was no abrupt, or traumatic historical change for Germany's political change during the 1930's. The spectacle of a "new Germany" was a peaceful and calm process for German history, it not come close to shaking the foundations of German productive relations. The same German capitalism that brought them Liberal democracy brought them Fascism with ease.

Often times, reactionary historians attempt to mystify Nazism, as though the "thousand year Reich" was a real possibility that was simply evil. Hitler got what he wanted: today he is villainized but with a degree of respect, a hair away from being the comic book antagonist everyone can't help but love. The spirit of Stalin had it right: "The enemy is not as great and terrible as some psuedo-intellectuals like to make him". While liberal societies trembled and were shook with temptation, with a kind of political existential crises at the sight of fascism, it was not ideologically traumatic at all for Soviet Communism. For them the Nazis were false pretenders and almost 'orientalized' barbarians.

The mentality that we cannot fit the holocaust into a real, rational historical paradigm because this would "trivialize" it is a lie. The only thing that trivializes the victims of barbarism is to mystify the circumstances of their plight. Degenerate ideologues attempt to exploit the horror and trauma of the holocaust to substantiate and legitimize their crypto-religious and reactionary narratives. That when "push comes to shove" we ought to quit our Marxist bullshit and accept "what's real". On the contrary, let us Marxists prove our dedication and loyalty to the legacy of our predecessors by making no compromise even before the temptations of traumatic shock and sentiment. Our sentiment is not theirs. Our shock is not theirs. It is ours. Only cowards reveal themselves liars and pretenders in their inability to ideologically articulate events outside of ruling ideas.

Shame on he who whitewashes history and revokes capitalism of responsibility for the systemic and industrial murder of those it deemed worthless. We had promised the world socialism or barbarism just decades before. Are we to go back on this? It remains true.

[Dodo]

yes, it is still man that makes history, not an invisible driving force. You should definitely blame Hitler. However it is also obvious that such "thoughts" would not gain mass recognition under every circumstance.

[Rafiq]

yes, it is still man that makes history, not an invisible driving force. You should definitely blame Hitler. However it is also obvious that such "thoughts" would not gain mass recognition under every circumstance.

But this isn't about any kind of historical necessity. Anti-Semitism had become an integral part of the reproduction of capitalist relations for many decades by this point. I certainly am skeptical of the notion that holocaust was mechanically necessitated by capitalism as told by Bordiga - it ignores or de-emphasizes the ideological dimension of Anti-semitism and the role it played in capitalism.

Hitler cannot be blamed in the sense that without him there would be no problem. Certainly, revolutionary justice would demand his blood, as it did citizen capet. However this has no place in a disciplined and comprehensive historical analysis.

[Illegalitarian]

As operation Barbarossa pretty much guaranteed Germany would lose the war, Hitler et al. decided to expedite the cleansing process as they wished to have some lasting legacy, even in defeat. This should not be taken to mean the holocaust would not have occurred sans Barbarossa. You might want to look at the nazi racial schemes set to take effect 10-20 years after wars end. Even the French would have been fucked.

Though for ardent nazis, the killings did display the sincerity of their beliefs, as opposed to a cynical means of maintaining power. They actually believed their own propaganda. That was the message they wanted to show the world. This was not simply a matter of losing, and needing someone to blame, though it very well began in that fashion.

The holocaust and Barbarossa were each symptomatic of the same stunning lack of pragmatism and utter lunacy that infected the upper echelons of nazi leadership. But this was not a belief in a standard, even a pseudoscientific standard, but rather a belief in cult-like madness. They failed to protect those they had sworn to defend.


That isn't to say we should take some liberal humanist interpretation of events, that the Nazi's were "psychopaths" in order to avoid the fact that, if placed in the shoes of the Nazi leadership so to speak, most people would have behaved relatively in the same way, but it is also important, when speaking of motivation, to view Nazism through the same lens we would view theocracy.

We should also view things from a Marxist perspective as well and consider the class basis for fascism, the degradation of bourgeois political and economic structures being supplemented by growing social power from the petite bourgeois and the cultural values that more heavily manifest themselves in this class, becoming more identifiable by the rest of the masses, as well as the growing the tensions throughout Europe on the Jewish question, the rise of scientific racism, etc, obviously, but looking at the men behind these manifestations is also important.

[synthesis]

Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem made it sound like quite a bit of effort was expended on the part of the Nazis in trying to deport Jews as an initial 'solution'. However the ease and speed at which the policy was changed to extermination also makes it seem as if it had been something that had always been a realistic option for the regime.

I read something a ways back that makes me think it could be argued that the unique horrors of the Holocaust were almost exclusively a result of the industrialization of genocide - and not just in the way that people might think.

The gas chambers, from what I understand, were a direct result of the Nazi regime's observations of the deleterious effects of old-fashioned genocide - i.e., a bullet in the head - upon their own troops' "morale." (Meaning, based on what they themselves saw, they thought Nazi soldiers would fight better if they didn't have to witness and perpetrate the mass executions on a face-to-face basis, and therefore the process of genocide was subjected to industrialization.) (Bear with me while I look for the source on this.)

[Dodo]

But this isn't about any kind of historical necessity. Anti-Semitism had become an integral part of the reproduction of capitalist relations for many decades by this point. I certainly am skeptical of the notion that holocaust was mechanically necessitated by capitalism as told by Bordiga - it ignores or de-emphasizes the ideological dimension of Anti-semitism and the role it played in capitalism.

Hitler cannot be blamed in the sense that without him there would be no problem. Certainly, revolutionary justice would demand his blood, as it did citizen capet. However this has no place in a disciplined and comprehensive historical analysis.
I can come to terms with antisemitism being integrated into capitalist dynamics of the day.
I am just not friendly to idea of taking the "agency" out of the structures and present what happened as a result of capitalist ideology of the time and crisis dynamics. If it was not Hitler and another anti-semite we might not have had something at the scale of holocoust or maybe there could have been something more. The possibilities are endless, even if conditions do not appear randomly.

[Gileson]

I don't see how you can say how there wouldn't be an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust with no Hitler or somebody like him without pushing a ''Great Man'' approach.

[The Intransigent Faction]

what is Bordiga's analysis?

http://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/bordiga/auschwitz.htm

Sorry to just throw a link at you, but it might be better if you read it for yourself.

In short, he analyzes anti-Semitism as a materialist phenomena arising from economic circumstances, culminating in the Holocaust.
Further, though, he rails against the use of Nazism and the Holocaust by liberal capitalists and bourgeois politicians to try to whitewash capitalism's long list of other atrocities in comparison.

[Gileson]

Steve Pinker is usually completely facile and wrong.

Yeah, his book's approach to the Holocaust reeked of him trying to spin Nazi Germany's atrocities as being from Great Man Hitler with German exceptionalism. Especially with Pinker deriding historians who don't follow Pinker's spin.

[Rafiq]

I can come to terms with antisemitism being integrated into capitalist dynamics of the day.
I am just not friendly to idea of taking the "agency" out of the structures and present what happened as a result of capitalist ideology of the time and crisis dynamics. If it was not Hitler and another anti-semite we might not have had something at the scale of holocoust or maybe there could have been something more. The possibilities are endless, even if conditions do not appear randomly.

It is a given that agency is of importance. Agency determines the precise character of things. Undoubtedly, we can only ever retrospectively incorporate individual actions into a wider historical paradigm. As unscientific as this may seem, the whole point is - precisely as you have mentioned, demonstrating why such individuals were significant in a given circumstances in the first place. However, I think that the overall analysis of the holocaust, and the part Hitler personally played in it is a problem not limited to quarrel over materialism. Undoubtedly I think it is completely wrong, even if we were to adopt some kind of positivist approach, to attribute Hitler blame for the holocaust - the idea that there is some kind of linear timeline between Mein Kampf and Hitler's election as chancellor is completely wrong. Hitler was a raving buffoon - it is not as though Germany was led down a dark path because Hitler had crowds in a trance-like state. The trance was a historical trance, and while we may not ever know if things would have been precisely the same with or without Hitler (And believe me, I am very fond of the idea of the butterfly effect - so this has little to do with the magnitude of Hitlers personal influence but more how his precise agency affected things), but judging by the degeneration of capitalism globally, and the rise of Fascism in Italy - it would appear that the chances of capitalist degeneracy in Germany were quite likely given the political climate and the disorganized, blunderous actions of the German Left.

Indeed, I don't even think German Fascism was necessarily inevitable, let alone Hitler personally. I simply think that the fall of the Liberal apparatus in Germany was inevitable.

[OnFire]

IMO Hitler (and Nazism) was the personification of capitalism in decay, which was after all responsible for these horrible deeds.

[#FF0000]

I don't see how you can say how there wouldn't be an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust with no Hitler or somebody like him without pushing a ''Great Man'' approach.

Saying that an individual leader had a vital role to play in an event isn't really the "Great Man" approach, though. Individuals like Napoleon or Hitler did have a massive impact on the course of history. However, they didn't do it themselves, and they didn't do it through sheer force of will.

I hate dropping quotes but Marx did say it pretty succintly (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm):
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

[The Red Star Rising]

I think trying to approach Nazism as if it were a coherent and rational ideology is a fundamentally flawed method. Nazism is certainly a capitalistic ideology, but its not sane, scientific, or even really consistent by any means. It's ultra-right wing, ultra-authoritarian, ultra-nationalist and hyper-bigoted populism wrapped around with a great heaping glob of conspiracy theories (from the Nazis) and enough Pseudoscience to give Time Cube a run for its money. Hitler was undoutably the central figure of Nazism and the main driver for the ideology, but he was just one out of many terrible people (some of whom also had rather bizarre conceptions of how the world work) who made the Holocaust possible.

Hatred of Slavs, Anti-Communism, Antisemitism, Populism, Imperialism, Corporatism, Militarism, Nationalism, Pan-Germanism, Nordic Supremacism and Authoritarianism/Totalitarianism were all hardly new to Germany. What the Nazis did was take a lot of existing sentiments and magnify and promote them. The Chaos experienced in Germany following WW1 and later the onset of the great depression were fertile ground for radicalism. What the Nazis essentially had, was the better propaganda machine and the greater ability to appeal to German capitalists while also selling the lower and middle classes on their ideolog. Hitler was certainly the central figure in all of this but the Iron Corporal was hardly the only person pushing forth the idea of the thousand year Reich.

Now, it's fairly obvious that there was a wide consensus among the inner circle of the Nazi party that in order to best stroke their state and race boner that they were going to do the following (in no particular order. A. Avenge the Versailles treaty (easy to sell everyone on, the Versailles treaty was pretty legitimately bullshit). B. Expand Germany past it's current borders, primarily at the expense of other Germanic Nations from Belgium and Luxembourg to Sweden and Austria and the Slavic nations like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the USSR. C. Get rid of the Jews behind some vast all reaching conspiracy that was responsible for everything from the formation of the Soviet Union to Hollywood. D. Purge or enslave all other Race/State enemies like Slavs, Blacks, Gypsies, Communists, the LGBT community, the disabled and a laundry list of others the Nazis weren't keen on. E. Dominate the world through either soft (economic hegemony) or hard (world conquest) means.

Getting rid of/enslaving the undesireables was always on the Nazis agenda and Germany was quite frighteningly hardly reluctantly dragged along for the ride. The real question was essentially how to deal with the undesireables. And unfortunately for the world, they settled on liquidation. Why? Well as Nazi Germany's most superior teutonic diplomacy made enemies out of pretty much the rest of the developed world by 1942 it's likely that two concerns with the exile idea came up. The first is the simple practical difficulty concerning shipping the undesireables to places like madagascar. The other was that in the Nazi worldview, the war was now a struggle between the pure and righteous forces represented by the Axis, and the sinister front for the Jew ruled world order represented by the Allies (the Nazis believed that this great Jewish conspiracy was behind both Franco-Anglo-American Finance and International Communism all out to get good German capitalists, they were crazy like that) for the soul of the world.

Thus simple exile was now just a temporary solution for a permanent problem. Thus the holocaust became, to Germany, the moral decision to purge this perceived corruption from the world. They weren't cackling saturday morning cartoon villains (though they certainly had the grasp on reality of one), Germany honestly believed that this was the right thing to do. And the German people decided to comply with this decision (records indicate that the Wehrmacht and Citizenry were quite aware that the Holocaust was going on) due to the poison fed into them that brought out the worst in them. And that reality is more horrifying than any narrative that this was all the fault of one man. Hitler certainly brought about the greatest calamity of the 20th century, but it does a disservice to everyone who sought to defeat him and everyone who seeks to stop another Hitler from arising to forget that he could have never have done what he did without the obedience of Germany. How? A combination of already toxic sentiments lingering in Germany and through much the same methods corporations use to convince you to buy things you don't need every day.

Also because I'm on a roll and wish to further break the mystique around the Nazis I'll keep on going with shattering the myth of their superiority but that's for another thread.

[JayBro47]

I don't know if I agree that the holocaust was a "last-resort" and last goodbye. I mean there might have been a turning point in 1943 after Stalingrad but the holocaust was underway by 1942 and Operation Reinhardt was finished by 1943! I mean if the holocaust began in 1944, maybe it would have been true, it's a final "kiss of death" to history.

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

Well, Hitler was the main proponent and instigator of the Jewish genocide and prodded ranking Nazis when he thought they were sidelining antisemitism. It's possible that a Jewish genocide would have occurred without Hitler, but that is counter factual. The real issue, I think, is not whether or not Hitler was to blame, he was, though he wasn't the only one, but whether assessing blame really helps us understand how genocide happened. Incidentally, the holocaust certainly focused on Jews, but it did not focus on them exclusively. The Nazis murdered at least 12 million humans in the camps, about half of whom were Jewish. And there were another 8 million or so civilians from Russia and Poland, again about half of whom were Jewish. The purpose there was to steal their land for German colonization within Europe.

What is especially shocking about the Holocaust is just how ordinary the perpetrators were. The Nazis were not just evil, but they were evil in ways that most people would never image could be evil. One way that they were evil was to implicate pretty ordinary folks in the details of genocide. Turns out that is a pretty standard operating procedure for genocidal state actors. Rwanda imported a million machetes specifically for mass murder because they were very up-close-and-personal weapons that ordinary people could use and would cause them to feel implicated after.

[Ocean Seal]

I ask since according to Pinker's Better Angels, Hitler was ''mostly responsible'' for the Holocaust.

Also, has there ever been a Marxist approach to Nazi Germany's atrocities?
Yes saying that Hitler was "mostly responsible" for the Holocaust is an idealist sentiment, grounded in the great man theory. Hitler was undoubtedly responsible for the Holocaust considering the post that he took, but it was fascism itself which brought about the Holocaust. Hitler's Germany is what capitalism looks like in its most degenerate stages. Mass incarceration, public spectacle, and the war machine. If he wasn't killing people based on race, he would have done it based on something else, but without the mass labor camps and spoils of war Nazi Germany could not have existed.

[etiennel]

I'm not sure whether it was wholly his fault, but he did hate Jews and he did lead the party who carried out the atrocities.

[Invader Zim]

The 'Great Man' debate surrounding the Third Reich and the Holocaust has been somewhat misunderstood in this thread. But Ocean Seal basically gets it mostly might (save the first half of the last sentence, which enters the unknowable counter-factual) with the following:


"Yes saying that Hitler was "mostly responsible" for the Holocaust is an idealist sentiment, grounded in the great man theory. Hitler was undoubtedly responsible for the Holocaust considering the post that he took, but it was fascism itself which brought about the Holocaust. Hitler's Germany is what capitalism looks like in its most degenerate stages. Mass incarceration, public spectacle, and the war machine. If he wasn't killing people based on race, he would have done it based on something else, but without the mass labor camps and spoils of war Nazi Germany could not have existed."


To give a bit more detail:

The question boils down, essentially, to asking whether the power wielded by Hitler within the Third Reich was approaching absolute, that the events that took place in the Third Reich were the direct result of Hitler's personality, ideology and will, or, whether Hitler was a subject of the processes and structures which powered the engine of events within the Third Reich - finally, does the answer lie somewhere in-between.

I think, fairly obviously, the answer is somewhere in-between. Even if many of the events within the Third Reich developed well beyond the control of any one individual, Hitler was an instrumental functionary in the creation of the environment and ideology which led to the Holocaust. Moreover, it is simply unfathomable that the decision to exterminate the Jews was not ultimately taken by Hitler. At some point in 1941, Himmler almost certainly summoned to Hitler and was instructed to formulate a plan to begin the industrialised extermination of the Jews and other "undesirable" peoples within Occupied Europe. Given what we know about power in the Third Reich, there is no conceivable scenario in which such a monumental decision would have been delegated.

Of course, Hitler himself did not then proceed to exterminate millions of people, and the structures and apparatus erected to facilitate this policy, and indeed the architecture of that policy, were certainly delegated (Hitler did not do detail). Meanwhile, Hitler, like everyone, was a product of material conditions - as Marx correctly noted, a persons social consciousness does not spring from nothing, it is the product of the material environment in which they are born, raised, and live. Hitler was no different. Thus, Hitler is not some kind of entirely independent agent, the parameters of his agency were subject to forces well beyond his control.

If we look at the Holocaust itself, we see that the Holocaust was a process (or rather processes) which developed in a fairly ad hoc fashion as material conditions changed. Intentionalists, those who support the idea that Hitler's will was the chief force which led to the origins of the Holocaust, shaped its character, and powered its engine, often suggest that Hitler had planned, or at least wanted, to exterminate the Jews from the early 1920s. This, to my mind, simply does not add up. The trajectory of Nazi policy to the Jews underwent a clear process of evolutions as the situation in the Third Reich developed. Initially, the policy to remove Jews from the Third Reich was one of forced migration: Jews were literally dumped on the borders of the Third Reich with nothing and forced out. As the Third Reich began to expand, and more and more Jews (including many who had been expelled) came under Nazi control, this plan took on a more extreme dimension, which ultimately extended to the Madagascar Plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan). This plan would undoubtedly have resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of the Nazis victims, but it stopped short of full-scale extermination. However, once the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union, with its large Jewish population and huge numbers of other undesirables (who were envisioned to be enslaved before ultimately exterminated as well) made such a plan impractical. It was then, in the late Summer 1941 that the decision to exterminate Jews en masse was taken. The Einsatzgruppen death squads, facilitated and in direct conjunction with the Heer (contrary to the good Wehrmacht myth), began the mass extermination of huge numbers of Jews as they encountered them in the Soviet Union. These soon took on crude industrial techniques and the first experiments with Gas Vans, as it became clear that mass shootings had a negative psychological impact on Wehrmacht and SS perpetrators. By late 1941 the Death Camps began to operate (for instance, Chelmno began exterminating people in December 1941, and at Auschwitz the first rudimentary tests with Zyklon B had begun in August - an ominous prelude to what was to come).

Even the camps themselves underwent a process of evolution as the Nazis' plans took on an increasingly radical character and the necessity for a full-scale industrial death system, built of Fordian principles, became apparent. So, what we see is that there was little actual long-term planning. There was clear and continual rethinking about logistics, operations and apparatus to match the demands increasingly radical policy. Auschwitz, for example, was not built as a death camp at all, but a site to terrorise the local Polish population, and had to be adapted. If we look at Auschwitz-II Birkenau's apparatus, then we see the same process in minature, that little was initially purpose built for the processes of extermination that were utilised. Krema-II was a retrofitted mortuary, and actually had a rather inefficient floor plan (for instance, the incinerator was on a different floor from the gas chamber, there was a lift connecting the two which had to be expanded to eliminate that particular bottleneck). Krema-III was built with the same inefficient floor plan.

So, to bring this back to Hitler, clearly, whatever his early rhetoric, there was no clear plan to exterminate the Jews en masse until well into the Second World War and the industrialised facilities and methods were relatively hasty responses to new policy demanding immediate action, rather than something purpose-built with the ultimate scale of the Holocaust in mind. This does not suggest that there is much in the "intentionalist" argument, and suggests that when Hitler gave the order he did so in the light of changing events which were beyond his control. And while Hitler certainly gave the order to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, the processes which evolved, from which we understand the character of the Holocaust, appear to have been developed by middle and lower managers in the light of material conditions.

So, yes, Hitler was indeed responsible for the Holocaust (and we could talk about the development of ideology and his role in that) and the programme of extermination would not and could not have occurred without his explicit order. However, this does not make him a "great man", whose will shaped the course of history, it makes him a vital linchpin, who played an important functional role within a massive structure much of which was well beyond his individual control. As Rafiq notes, we can not deny historical agency to individuals, what we need to do is understand how material conditions shaped their social-conditions, the frameworks in which their decisions were made, and the availability of options open to them.

[cyu]

The more authoritarian a regime, the more it can be thrown wildly off-track by its single point of failure at the top. If someone with absolute power goes a little crazy, then his society goes a little crazy. If someone with absolute power goes a lot crazy, then his society goes a lot crazy.

Often pro-capitalists would claim that capitalist economies are much more advanced than communist economies, proving communism fails. I would usually reply that it wasn't capitalism that saved those economies, but democracy (however little that remained) that saved them, despite capitalism. The difference is the amount of authoritarianism - when everybody thinks like the dictator, progress dries up - it's running off of one CPU, instead of millions of parallel processors.

[IrishAnarchist]

I believe responsibility lies with the nazi movement, if it wasnt for that movement I believe its very likely there would have been no holocaust of Jewish people. I think blaming one man is to simple, to easy to do. Id even lay blame with German history prior to nazis even forming, Antisemitism was around a lot longer before Hitler wrote mean kampf. Id also lay blame on the economic depression in capitalism in the 1930s, this aloud the nazis to preach their antisemitism and fascist platform