On Hitler, Nazis, and Democracy

The German people didn't develop democracy but had it forced on them from outside, being simultaneously betrayed and lied to at the Treaty of Versailles. When they agreed to the armistice in WW1, they were in a position where they still might have won the war.

And so it was that Hitler and the Nazis won over the electorate; it's not just the thirty percent that voted for them, making them the majority party. They continued to win the support of the MAJORITY. But this is not really the fault of the German people because they didn't ask for the inferior institution of democracy. Britain, France, and the U.S.A. thus helped the Nazis to power as much as the Germans did.

Interestingly, Hitler was a professional artist(of decent talent I think) and attempted to dodge the draft for WW1, fleeing Austria for Germany, only to be arrested and forced to fight. War-time Europe partly made Hitler into the insane monster he was.

And, after WWI, I don't think there's much good that could be said about Hitler. He was an evil megalomaniac, and I don't understand the great interest that many Americans do find in him... except that it shows where part of our society is. His ideas were unsound and stale. He was a terrible war leader: he had Britain in a lost position and could have conquered her in all likelihood. Instead, he invaded Russia and re-created the two-front war that had just cost Germany so dearly.

It seems to me that German society was very advanced in some ways because they managed to put up a fight despite being burdened at every turn by their incompetent and insane leadership(German engineers, toward the end of the war, gave Hitler a revolutionary fighter jet and he insisted that it be used ONLY as a bomber, something it simply wasn't designed for.) And at the end of it all, the good people of Germany suffered terribly.