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Re:I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its pre... by Crito on Thursday December 19, 2013 @05:20PM (#6938338)
The Nazi regime was fundamentally self-destructive. German citizens who witnessed the mass Jewish suicide and were swayed by into practicing non-violent resistance would have become targets of the Nazis themselves. Were they to kill themselves to make a point as well?

The only way that loosing the support of the uninformed German masses would have stopped the Nazis is if those previously uninformed German masses took up arms against their government. The Nazis were only going to stop killing once there was nobody left to kill, or once they were killed. They played by a different set of rules.

Re:I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its pre... by brazzy on Thursday December 19, 2013 @06:34PM (#6938788)
It looks like you've fallen into the trap of seeing "the Nazis" as the ultimate, perfect and monolithic evil. They were not. They were regular humans with quite disparate personalities and motivations.

And they needed active support from the "uninformed German masses" - why do you think Goebbels was their 3rd or 4th most important man? The support was gained through propaganda, and the core parts of that were the all-around (including moral) superiority of the Aryan race and in contrast the portrayal of Jews as its absolute enemy, both despicable and threatening.

If that propaganda had been revealed as a lie via large-scale non-violent protests, it would have caused serious and quite possibly unsurmountable problems for the Nazi government - they did not have nearly enough hardened ideologues to run the entire country.

Re:I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its pre... by Crito on Thursday December 19, 2013 @08:50PM (#6939402)
"It looks like you've fallen into the trap of seeing "the Nazis" as the ultimate, perfect and monolithic evil."

No, I don't think that.

What I think is that are a fine example of people who could not be stopped with anything but violence. Killing or letting them have their way were the only options.

They likely could not have run the country without the support of the German people (I'd like to point out that it is not clear that they could have run the country _even with_ the support of the German people; they were still on a self-destructive trajectory even if they had not been at war with the Allied forces...) but they could have kept the slaughter going. While having an industrialized society does make genocide more efficient, it is by no means a prerequisite for genocide.

The Nazis required propaganda not because they were afraid of what would happen if the German public became peacefully non-cooperative. They needed propaganda to 1) prevent a violent rebellion in Germany and 2) remain strong in the face of violent opposition from the Allied forces.

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Succinctly put:

I do not believe that the Germans were pure monolithic ultimate evil.

I do not believe that this would have been a winning strategy:

"You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

Against the Nazis, I believe that is the strategy of a fool.