re: #181 Desert Dog

German National Socialism began as a local copy, not of Communism, but of Mussolini’s Italian Nationalist Fascism. But it was strictly a bottom-of-the-barrel, office-in-a-cigar-box affair until the German Army sent a disaffected, medically-discharged corporal name Adolf Hitler to “infiltrate” their meetings to determine if they could be used against the Communists, in the days immediately after the Spartacist uprisings in 1919-20.

It was a classic, and ultimately horrendous, example of synchronicity, or maybe evil synergy, right up there with Napoleon and the Directory.

The German Army got what they wanted- in spades. In the end, they got a “corporate-syndicalist” state, with them calling the shots. Or at least, they thought they were, until the Nazis went from “getting organized” to “getting really organized”. That’s when they found out that the “attack dog” they’d created now was holding their leash.

The moral being that letting generals play politics is a fundamentally bad idea. Which is why our Constitution, unlike the German Wiemar version, strictly prohibits it.

While German National Socialism had some “socialist” trappings, it was decidedly not Communistic in nature. Which makes the later Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that much more bizarre. I have come to conclude that either (a) both sides here were looking for a chance to stab the other in the back, or (b) Ribbentrop and his boss outsmarted Molotov and his boss. (The latter being more likely, as Stalin was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and was more worried about imagined disloyalty in his own army than anything Hitler might have been up to at the time.)

cheers

eon