This comment seems historically substantive at first but then veers into trollish weirdness. Please don't do that, especially not on inflammatory topics (of all of which this is the mother).

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024458 and marked it off-topic.

Except a process for producing fertilizer had been invented by an ardent German nationalist named Fritz Haber and had been productionslized by Karl Bosch. The Haber-Bosch process had been scaled up to produce explosives for World War 1. Haber also spent the war developing chemical weapons for Germany. Despite this, he still won the Nobel Prize for Haber-Bosch process in 1918 due to its applications to agriculture and solving the fertilizer crisis.

This doesn't change the fact that land was still valuable enough to fight a genocidal war over it. But it does make it more poignant that after Haber invented the pesticide Zyklon A, it was reformulated and used to murder his family. Haber, like many Germans who served their country in WWI, was Jewish.

It's not obvious that land was valuable enough to fight a genocidal war over. I mean Germany has a bigger population today than it did then.

But Hitler wanted a genocidal war, so he had to come up with some reasons to bolster the case.

>> But Hitler wanted a genocidal war

That is the easy answer. The west, due to cold war realities, has placed far too much on hitler's shoulders. He was evil but no comicbook supervillain. By blaming everything on the core nazis, most all conveniently dead, we can more quickly forgive everyone else. The reality was that they each stood atop a large social structure. They were products of history, not super-evil monsters dropped into the scene deus ex machina. It is too far to say that "Germany" wanted genocide, but the answer has to be somewhere between the bookends of "Hitler wanted X" and "Germany wanted X".

> "Hitler wanted X" and "Germany wanted X".

Well thats the point. Because even if todays borders are considered "untouchable" through international law, that was not so much the case in the beginning of the 20th century.

In fact re-drawing borders was exactly what seemed a completely legitimate way to "penalize" Germany/Austria for the Great War. So it is no wonder that Germans had no hesitations about the "land-grabbing" part of Hitler's policy - land grabbing was totally legit, ey?

Of course, putting those guys in charge of operation land-grab which had the most vile hatred of them all was on part of the German populace naive at best and complicit at worst. But then, what opposition to expect, if the Nazi-genocide's first victims were Germans, basically muting almost all opposition by emmigration or death.

Also, about the in retrospect outlandishness of the Germans for wanting to grab land from its neighbors - what did Germany's contemporaries do right after WW2? Demanding to shift some borders: The USSR+UK at the expense of Germany and Poland with Germany loosing 30% of its territory. France incorporated itself the Saarland. The Netherlands wanted to increase itself by ~30% at the expense of Germany. Belgium had plans for annexation and even tiny Luxembourg saw fit some expansion.

Lol. I'm just glad for any reply that doesn't scream at me for "defending hitler". There are certain subjects that go south very quickly on the internets. I only realized afterwards that I had poked a very big bear.

"Lol" - yeah exactly. Where am I defending Hitler?

I haven't read Mein Kampf and my understanding of the final solution was that it was the last of several 'solutions', most of which didn't involve genocide so is the 'desire' for a genocidal war that accurate?

Secondly, what of his twisted advisors? I think it would be fascinating to read tertiary literature of sentiment in that era and how people with those sentiments gained influence.

I think you might be misunderstanding what "the final solution" was meant to solve.. it was not meant to solve an economic problem per-we but to solve the racists view of the Jews by killling them all.. so i think it is fair to say that the final solution of killing all the Jews was most definitely involved a desire for a genocidal war.

Well first of all, you are right - the 'final solution' was one of many solutions for the 'Judenfrage' and it wasn't like the NSDAP put the most extreme solution on the ballot box.

Secondly, the 'twisted advisors' shouldn't be seen as a few extremists, but rather the then-current alumni of a school-of-thought that was in the making for at least hundred years before WW2: Reactionary nationalism driven anti-semitism (as opposed to the anti-semitism that roamed europe before the 18th century).

Within these 100 years multiple people discussed 'solutions' and often the legitimate ultima-ratio seemed to be capital punishment, if the Jews weren't leaving by other means (As today some politicians would legitimize shooting illegal aliens at border-crossings).

All the anti-semites need to do to gain influence was to add fuel to the flames of the 'treason'-narrative.

As a Canadian, your last sentence is comical. I know the US media pushes the Trump = Hitler meme, I really don't buy it though. Worst case, he might just be another GWB.

> Worst case, he might just be another GWB.

I really think the worst thing Trump may do for America is make everyone think George W Bush wasn't that bad. The guy is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. He and his administration did objectively terrible things. Trump so far has proposed a few awful ideas and has spoken in a way that is awful and at times terrifying but he hasn't actually done much, yet.

We really can't forget how awful the Bush administration was.

Normalizing neocon policies and forgetting various failures of the GWB era actually feels less dangerous than normalizing transparent and blatant lying and demagoguery and the precedent for handing the country over to whatever reality TV personality blames immigrants the loudest.

I judge presidents by their intent. The reason we all hate politics and politicians is because they have an impossible job, of choosing between nothing but bad choices. GWB made a lot of mistakes. But I believe he always had good intentions and wanted to help society.

Trump seems to be the modern day Andrew Jackson, and seems to have only personal gain as a motivator in his life.

I judge Presidents by their policy outcomes combined with original intent, with intent mattering very little.

You can't feed your family off intentions.

Judging policy as good/bad is different from saying "did objectively terrible things". The latter is saying that they had bad intentions.

>The latter is saying that they had bad intentions.

Does it really? Sometimes good intentions can end up with objectively terrible outcomes because nobody can see into the future. The proverb "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" comes to mind.

I think there's a lot of truth to that proverb because the vast majority of people don't think of themselves, or the reasons they do things, as "evil" or bad. In their internal logic most people act for "good reasons", but "good" can be a rather subjective thing, so the internal reasoning doesn't always translate properly to the outcomes in external reality.

The troubling thing is that presidents are so often consumed with an idea of greatness that is completely antithetical to that. They want to be remembered as a great leader. Not as some lame victim of circumstance.

To have heroes we also need villains. It is terribly unfair, but maybe that should act as a warning. If you hold the lives of thousands in the balance your own reputation will be linked to the fate of those people.

GWB had the choice of (1) start war in Iraq for vague reasons, (2) don't start war in Iraq.

He chose (1).

You're aware of the 1998 Act signed by Bill Clinton I hope?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act

And the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Iraq_(1998) ?

"The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is a United States Congressional statement of policy stating that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq..."[1][2] It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, .... "

He stopped short of an invasion, though. It can be official US policy to oppose a regime and yet not start a war.

His rhetoric (and others in the Democrat government, including Hillary's) was comparable to GWB's.

To talk big and not do anything emboldens the target.

Good example, as far as the historical record is concerned, GWB thought that they had WMDs. Any claims that it was started for another reason needs evidence or it ventures into conspiracy theory territory.

The idea that Saddam had nuclear weapons seems like more of a conspiracy theory to me, since there was never a single piece of evidence for it. Saddam did have chemical weapons that USA helped him use against Iran, but experts agreed their shelf life had expired and they had aged to the point of uselessness by 2003. Lots of other nations that haven't been invaded do have "WMDs", so anyone reasonable would certainly suspect "another reason".

I don't recall the official line ever being 'nuclear weapons'. It was always 'chemical weapons', which were redefined to be 'weapons of mass destruction' in order to then be grouped with nuclear weapons and have some of that fear become associated with them. The irony, of course, was seen in the US bragging about going into Iraq with the largest conventional munition ever made, the MOAB (mother-of-all-bombs).

The Iraq war was used to bolster voters for the next year's election - the US had been punching ghosts and getting nowhere in Afghanistan after 9/11, so they switched targets to one that looked similarly foreign and, more importantly, couldn't hide.

You don't recall all the back-and-forth about the IAEA? Hans Blix had visited this site and El Baradei had visited that site? Really? Do you actually remember that time, or do you just remember later reporting about it? Because in the news I watched in 2002-3, it was all IAEA all the time.

Yep, I remember that, and the inspections had a timeline that would have concluded in several months after the US invasion started. The US's allies were asking it to wait for those inspections to conclude.

Then, of course, the US ignored them because "he's going to hide the evidence", invaded for its own reasons... and famously found nothing. Blix was painted as an incompetent by the US, but even after stomping Iraq into dust and having full control of the country, the US found nothing.

Yep, lots of people were wrong about this. Being wrong is not evil though.

It certainly can be, and in this case it was. The GWB administration kept ignoring evidence and demanding new evidence until finally evidence could be manufactured that fit their policy goals. (This isn't a partisan judgment, since this tragedy was repeated as farce in the lead-up to the Democrat Party's war in Libya. Still, leaving the Libyans to their own devices after the horrible meaningless unprovoked war has probably been better for everyone than what we've done instead in Iraq.)

Have you ever heard of Project for a New American Century?

GWB wasn't that bad. He was sort of average as far as US presidents go.

It's easy and comforting to dismiss the idea as hyperbole, but there is a lot of concrete evidence pointing in the other direction.

He's not Hitler--he's something new. But anyone who has studied history a bit recognizes similarities in rhetoric and tactics. Given that he is the commander and chief of the most powerful military in history, it seems natural to ask whether there might be also be similarities when it comes to political and societal goals. Given the stakes involved, I can't see how playing it down and hoping for the best is a wise approach.

he's a right wing populist demagogue, of which there have been countless examples. almost none of them were hitler or anything comparable, and while i am not looking forward to the next 4-8 years, it's not like he published a manifesto on the proclivities of the jew or proposed annexing mexico. quite the opposite on both counts, in fact.

Trump has repeatedly promoted using nuclear weapons against adversaries without any nuclear deterrent [0] and refers to people he doesn't like as animals [1]. What do you call that? Sounds like the pretext for genocide to me.

[0] https://thinkprogress.org/9-terrifying-things-donald-trump-h... [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78778261363320832...

i don't know what to tell you dude, he says stupid shit constantly and i think you should pay more attention to actual policy proposals and implementations than his idiotic tweets and context-free clickbait articles with the most hyperbolic statements that could be extracted from the record for your own sanity. if you're worried about a "pretext for genocide" i'd be way more worried about someone like duterte.

Trump has voiced support for Duterte and his policies, by the way.

Is he even right-wing? He's in favour of universal health care and was a major contributor ($300k) to Hillary's previous campaign.

Populist and (wannabe) demagogue I'll give you.

There's no comparison. How many right wing populists have had an organization like the NSA at their disposal? While he's clearly got some work to do in bringing the military and intelligence communities to heel, the potential danger if he's successful is extreme.

The reason the comparison is downplayed is because Hitler committed genocide and attempted to exterminate an entire race. Not only did he do these things, he talked about them before he had gained political power.

Now I am no Trump fan, and frankly think he's one of the worst president's we've ever had. But that doesn't make him Hitler; because as far as I am aware he's never said anything about wanting to commit genocide.

Bannon has, though. He thinks the correct solutions are the ones presented in Camp of the Saints.

in what way is Camp of the Saints an endorsement of genocide?

Come on. The main idea of that book is that not massacring all the arriving brown people is a mistake.

Of course, seeing as your username has an 88 in it, I really doubt your comment was sincere.

Passages from the book: http://emptylighthouse.com/camp-saints-most-hideous-passages...

Analysis: http://theweek.com/articles/611274/dystopian-antiimmigration...

"Exterminate an entire race" - if your referring to Jews, then it is sad that you adopt Hitler's position that Jews are a separate and distinct race. That position is the start of a slippery slope that ends with them being sub-human and "other" than "us".

I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and this is the first time I've been compared to Hitler. Not sure if I should be proud (of the fact that this is the first time) or sad.

I'm sure that you were unaware that you were repeating a viewpoint of his on that particular point of race.

It's difficult to see much similarity between what the Trumpets have done and what the Nazis had done by the time they won their election. Moreover, we rarely appreciate how vile the politics of the western world was in those days.

On the one hand it was the age of Organisational Man, who worked for big companies, or states more centralised than any in history. Indeed, with colonialism still not dead, a realist thinker might imagine that iron-fisted empires were the way of the future.

On the other hand, racism was still acceptable, not just among right-wing thugs like Hitler, but also on the left from the progressive eugenics movement, genocidal communist fantasists like H.G. Wells and plain-old to American bigots like Woodrow Wilson.

In those days it was fashionable for intellectuals to think that liberal-democracy was a has-been that could not organise well enough to Do What Needs To Be Done (and what "needed" to be done, was of often genocide).

It was in this cultural milieu that the Nazis and Bolsheviks rose and did what they did. Conditions like that don't exist in the West any more. I can see trends that might lead back to similar conditions -- but it will take a good 50 years for them to mature.

The problem is that we're never going to see conditions like the ones that led to Nazism or Bolshevism again. It's not that easy. It's like trying to identify the next Facebook by looking for companies who are copying Facebook--the next Facebook will be something completely different, just like the next infamous totalitarian dictator will be completely different.

If we're going to sit around waiting for the guy to commit genocide and start a world war before we take the threat seriously, it will be far too late to do anything about it. We need to look for leading indicators.

But what do you mean by not "sitting around"?

The tendency to treat Trump as inherently illegitimate and to ignore the voters behind him is just the kind of condition that might lead to future horrors. You might argue (though I wouldn't) that Trump's silliness is also such a leading indicator.

But so what? In a democracy both sides get their chance to push pull.

He's illegitimate to the extent that he attacks the democratic order itself. Even if Trump had actually won more votes, it wouldn't give him the right to ignore the constitution--by, for example, violating the Emoluments clause or interfering with congressional investigations. This isn't the normal ebb and flow of popular support, it's an attempt to fundamentally change our system of government.

While I agree, it's also way too late to start brandishing the Constitution about. A cynical observation: neither Democrats or Republicans give one fig for the Constitution, until The Other is in power.

Case(s) in point: the FCC, FDA, minimum wage laws, Federal involvement in education.

None of those is Constitutional without some laughable legal gymnastics around inter-State commerce, and yet very few people have been complaining about their existence over the years.

As a non-American observer, the whole system seems reminiscent of ancient Rome at the point where it had become an Empire but was still pretending it was a Republic.

While I completely agree that the constitution has been trampled on for a long time, I think there's still an important difference between those who pay lip service and those who brazenly defy it. Past administrations have at least felt the need to justify themselves, even if their justifications stretch logic to the point of absurdity. When the argument is instead "we don't need to justify our actions" I think that represents a stark and dangerous shift away from the rule of law.

Personally I think a feigned respect for the rule of law is actually more dangerous, as it allows people to rationalise their support of politicians and parties with little actual respect for same.

You may be right. Hopefully the silver lining of all this mess will be an awakened populace that holds even the less obviously tyrannical to account.

Or even the enablers of tyranny.

Take Obamacare as an example. Leaving aside the issue of whether socialised healthcare is a good idea, Obama had to circumvent the law by instructing the IRS to collect revenues via an executive order.

Is that really a precedent that should have been set? Even socialists should have been a little uneasy at the disregard for the Constitution there, but instead, the ends won out over the means, and it went ahead.

If Canada wanted nukes we could have nukes. CANDU reactors produce an abundance of plutonium and the technology to extract that.

The thing is if Canada had nukes then the US would treat Canada a lot differently in any potential conflict. It'd make a first strike with nuclear weapons necessary instead of something that would be massively disproportionate.

Bush didn't employ actual fascists like vitez Gorka of the Vitezi Rend, a Horthyite organization that helped the Nazis kill Jews, in his administration.

> The whole concept of "Lebensraum" seems like insanity today

More room = more people = more power is insane to you?

I think the truth in this point lies in the fact that this was when the British Empire was still around and held large swathes of land with sway over large numbers of people.

That plus the German Empire lost large amounts of land after the great war.

It wasn't insane to pursue land. Not at that time.

The reasons, "science" and supremacism that surrounded it? Yes. Unfortunately, the kind that sweeps a broken, defeated nation under a spell, a mass delusion of grandeur.

I think they meant insanely unethical, which it is.

"insane" is only a synonym for "extreme" when speaking in loose slang.

Insanely barbaric, when the "more room" part means taking it from other people. And when it's rationalized by racial and national mythology, then yes, it is absolutely insane.

Unfortunately some of those "other people" in other nations considered themselves German. And still do.

This is still what drives politics today.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/History_...

You have to get pretty creative to explain why the US are sprinkling missile interceptors ever closer to Russian soil without considering "mad power drive".

I don't see how ongoing cold war tension between the US and Russia constitutes a form of Lebensraum.

Canada does have enough nuclear material to dirty-bomb-style wipe out the eastern seaboard of the United States. Canada is the only country that wouldn't need to move their arsenal in order to perform an immediate no-warning military invasion of the United States. This assault may not win anything for Canada, but it would decimate the United States, and so in a game of mutual destruction, Canada has a card.

I've been told by un-citable sources that this is a pillar of Canadian military strategy and the primary reason the United States will not attack Canada.

Dirty bombs are a pretty empty threat and are a terrible first strike device. They don't "wipe out" anything. They are mostly area denial plan. Nobody would die immediately. The US would be able to fully retaliate with regular nuclear weapons. They wouldn't even need to do that. The USA could defeat the Canadian armed forces in several weeks and then ethnically cleanse the country to make room for all the refugees from the dirty bombed cities.

You'd also wouldn't be able to coat the entire seaboard with enough radiation to be all that dangerous.

If Canada really wanted a nuclear deterrent, it could just build or buy a nuke. Hell the USA would probably give them nukes with the codes. It's done so with other NATO allies in the past.

dirty bombs are totally ineffectual at anything beyond freaking people out per multiple studies. [1] the US wouldnt invade canada because canada is already essentially a client state that rarely doesn't bow to the US, and there is practically no added value in invading compared to the current arrangement. 90% of canada lives within 50 miles of the US border for a reason, and it aint just the weather. whoever told you this has no idea what they're talking about.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/f...

I'd be lying if I had a hard time imagining the Canadian military taking on the largest military in the world.

I don't see the US taking over Canada before a World War would break out, however, which I think is a bit more of a realistic mitigating factor.

There also would need to be a motivating factor. US doesn't have any reason to want to take over Canada.

We are one people (other than Quebecois) divided by an arbitrary border. In some sort of nationalist upheaval I could Americans wanting to "reunite" with Canada or something like that.

Or if the midwest grain fields stop yielding enough during a global drought, the USA might turns its eyes to newly thawing land up north.

It would look more like Germany taking over Austria than Germany invading Poland in any case.

By 2021 over a million positions are expected to be vacant as employable candidates opt for positions in the US and Europe. It appears global plans for Canada's destruction are proceeding satisfactorily.