I ran across an interesting article by Clive Irving, an American novelist and investigative reporter who had researched the basic process by which the German people capitulated to the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler. In the process of destroying a fledgling democracy, albeit an extremely economically distressed one at the end of World War I, he found there were four steps that essentially laid the groundwork for the capitulation. They were as follows:
The first was a disdain for elites of any kind, stirred up deliberately to encourage a sense of grievance in the masses of people who had suffered in the economic collapse of the 1920s and who viewed the flagrant decadence of Weimar Berlin as evidence of an urban elite (often portrayed as heavily influenced by Jews) that held too much sway.
The second was an understanding of the importance of a well-orchestrated propaganda machine. In the person of Joseph Goebbels Hitler discovered one of the great geniuses of modern political propaganda and, gaining control immediately of the national radio network, Goebbels infused the most pervasive new arm of the national media with the Nazi narrative of national rebirth under Hitler’s guiding vision of the Fatherland.
The third was putting into place all the apparatus of a police state in which the tasks of surveillance, intelligence and punishment were divided between the Gestapo and the state security service, the Reichsfuhrer-SS.
The fourth and final step was war which would enforce total and unquestioning loyalty to the Fatherland.
It’s something to think about.