Slashdot Mirror
Nobel Winner Says Internet Might Have Stopped Hitler
There can be little doubt that the internet has changed everyday life for the better, but Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has upped the ante by saying an earlier introduction of information technology could even have prevented World War II. "Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said. I have to agree with him. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries before the invasion of Poland, and one of history's greatest tragedies might have been averted.
It's reassuring to know that the internet can stop sociopathic tendency. *rolls eyes*
Reply to That ||
this discussion is done now.
*ducks*
it's been happening well into the days of the Internets Revolution and nobody's done a god damn thing about it
After all, everyone kills Hitler on their first trip.
Obviously. The minute Hitler saw how many members the "We dont lkie ppl kiling jewz!!!" Facebook group had, he'd have thrown in the towel right away.
Im sure that many aspiring dictators are foiled by the internet. Rather than stage political coups, they're all too busy trolling and participating in 4chan...
Im in ur internet, stopping ur warmongering mustache
I think there's a lot to be said about just giving something news coverage. My coworker made the comment that sometimes it's ok--maybe even better--to just ignore the news and relax. I had to disagree with him. I pointed out that even today a lot of things happen and giving them coverage on the news would be fighting half the battle. Being in the minds of the general populace is indeed a powerful thing.
... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
...
Take for instance Mark Twain & King Leopold of Belgium destroying the Congo Basin. Mark joined a group and tried to just inform people of what was going on. He wrote a pamphlet King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which a monologue dripping in satire of the King defending himself was designed to inform not only Americans but by and large his own people--who were unaware of the campaigns as they never saw the money. Were it not for a few brave people that could not be bribed, that information might never have gotten out! And think how easily this pamphlet might have been distributed across the internet!
And yet today, the campaigns were run so well that we don't know for sure how many millions were killed or had limbs hacked off and I don't recall it being mentioned in my primary or secondary school history books. Left largely unknown to me until relatively recently--much like the Philippine/American War & Iran/Iraq War.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat
So I am in no doubt the internet--an advanced dissemination of information--at anytime of war would help people collectively discuss and understand and do the right thing. I only wish I could have written a review of Mein Kampf for Germans to read before so many of them bought into it
My work here is dung.
Nice sentiment, but we have the internet now, and yet still, right this very second, the genocide in Sudan and Zimbabwe is very active. Not to mention the fact that the internet existed in the 90's, yet the 90's saw the worst genocide since the Holocaust and Pol Pot, with the (very preventable) genocide in Rwanda.
So, yeah. It's a nice fuzzy sentiment, but the recent and current active acts of genocide in the world are pretty clear evidence that it's just not true.
Yes, that would have stopped him and all his fanatical support.
He is wrong, of course. If he was right, the Neo-Nazis and other such groups would also die under the heat lamp of the internet... the Scientologists would fail to gain traction and influence as well.
I think the influence of the internet is over-estimated by this guy. Give me the nobel money... let'm keep his medal.
I think what people do not realize is how much people of the time where in the dark about the atrocities and way of life in Germany at the time. The reason other countries did not respond to the threat is because they did not realize there was one. The Internet would have made it impossible to hide these things (without some sort of great firewall of Germany). I actually thinks this one deserves not being on the idle list.
If the internet existed in WWII they would've had firewalls just the same as we see today, blocking freedom of information. OTOH the fledgling internet and BBSs had an influence on the fall of the Soviet Union.
Had the WWI allies not been so greedy, we could have helped the German economy and prevented the unrest that led to Hitler getting anywhere near power.
You won't find that in the history books, the victors write them for their own advantage.
I mean, its tough to have a meaningful discussion when the summary itself calls for Godwin to be invoked. :)
Maybe he would have stayed out of politics by having an outlet like crapart.org to get his work 'published'... (tough choice though - another "artist" on the internet or another despotic genocidal maniac. hmmm....)
Maybe the Internet can invent a time machine, send a robot back in time to kill Hitler's mother and save us all from the horrors of WWII?
'nuff said
. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries
So an internet chain mail would have stopped WW2. Right...
Newsflash : Hitler didn't cause WW2, he was the catalyst. The root cause of the war was the german people's resentment of the Versailles treaty, and particularly the war reparations and the way the French treated the Ruhr people when they failed to pay up. Hitler was considered slightly ridiculous and bizarre until he started to tap into the boiling anger the germans had inside them.
he could have used the internet to raise $$ and gain more support at home...
plenty of MPAA and RIAA and GOV nazi's still around
If the Internet can stop a dictator, all the more reason for dictators and government officials* with dictator like desires to control and censor the Internet.
* Officials in both autocratic and democratic governments. However with autocratic governments, they make plain what they plan to do and want. With democratic governments, one cannot always tell. Is their action based on maliciousness or incompetence?
... now everyone who has the same interests can find each other. IMHO it may have done the opposite, there were a LOT of people who thought like hitler in the era, it would have enabled people to find one another and support one another much more easily.
The internet does as much to inform, as it does to verify what one already believes. I've yet to see any idealogue be convinced by great arguments that their idealogy is false/wrong/error prone.
It takes intellectual honesty, something most idealogues don't have.
So a nobel prize winner came up with the idea that he should apply Godwin's law to his argument, thereby preventing someone else from raising the issue at a later date? Have I already lost the argument?
Godwin's law.
The Internet didn't stop George W. Bush.
"I think there's a lot to be said about just giving something news coverage. My coworker made the comment that sometimes it's ok--maybe even better--to just ignore the news and relax."
.
.
I stopped reading right there because i have a feeling the rest of what you are going to say is depressing. I think i'll go smoke some weed and feel better about life for awhile.
SO WHAT?
doxycycline might have stopped the "Black Death". How is this remotely newsworthy, to postulate modern technologies might have affected the past?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Nah, Hitler would have just sent out a bunch of DMCA takedown notices, and everyone would have had to pull all information on Germany, including photos, movies, etc.
Didn't stop Bush.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
But the specific examples given are a reach! An 'internet' at that time could have just as easily pushed it the other way too.
I've always been fascinated by this, WW2 broke out while industrial technology was very high in comparison to the information and media technology of the time.
IT was so low that the average person could be convinced that the other side were inhuman monsters, but industrial technology was good enough for us to bomb each other fairly easily.
In the case of WW2 the problem fixed itself in an odd way. The technology leaps that resulted from the war resulted in Television and jet travel, allowing information exchange and cultural awareness that was lacking when it started. Populations that had previously been scared with made-up xenophobic propaganda started listening to each other's music and watching each other's monster movies! It became easier to make war, and harder to convince an informed population to do it.
I have a 1938 radio and a 1948 television. If you look inside them the technology difference is mind-blowing. The tech leap during the war was incredible. Technology never progressed that fast before in history, and would not again until the computer industry came along and Moore's law kicked in.
So the internet may not have prevented Hitler, but his monsterous actions definitely helped set the stage for its development.
=Rich
Sorry about replying to myself. This covers the fall of the Soviet Union re: internet. http://mises.org/story/3060
... Forty-nine to go.
Hitler made extraordinarily effective use of mass media - newspapers, radio, film, even television in its infancy. You can scarcely speak of an organized democratic opposition to the rise of Hitler anywhere in a Europe - while in the states the Lindberghs were looking to Germany as "The Wave of the Future."
RED ALERT?
Godwin's law.. If anyone had tried to mention Hitler in a forum back then, all discussion would have stopped.
And while we're at it, is this lameness filter a fascist or what?
The Internet could have guided them to places where evil villains were spooking people into evil, dictatorial regimes.
Before the Internet, they just had to cruise around in the Mystery Machine in some fog, until they found some trouble to get themselves into.
Imagine an enraged Hitler, screaming: "I Vould half taken over ze Vorld wizout you meddlesome kinder!"
Oh, for optimal performance, you would have to throw in some Skooby-Snacks, as well.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Two points to consider:
1) Hitler actively embraced the newly emerging mass media technology called television. He also loved to make radio speeches.
2) Hitler was effectively elected dictator.
Hitler gained power through brilliantly capitalizing on the fear and discontent of inter-war Germans. He did that by USING mass media. If anything, the Internet probably would have helped him get his message out even more effectively.
Would it have slowed him down after he gained power, started the war and started doing the really nasty stuff? Probably not. You don't think Hitler was going to post on his blog about his death camps, do you? Or let any other eye-witnesses post on THEIR blogs?
1) Hitler actively embraced the newly emerging mass media technology called television. He also loved to make radio speeches.
And if you can't see the difference between a medium that lets a central authority send out messages and one that lets everyone else send messages, you missed the point of the internet.
The only question that remains is if the modern internet existed at the time of hitler, would it have stopped him, or would he have managed to filter and censor it.
"the great firewall of Germany"
Earliest Godwin Evar!
See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
I can feel the internet as it stops repression in Russia and Belaurus. Oh yeah, I can feel it! It's really working!!
Centralized or not, I don't think it makes all that much of a difference - it just requires a different set of tactics.
With a decentralized net, you go with astroturfers to support your goals and you drown out the other voices with innuendo, appeals to emotion, out right lies, etc.
On the net there is no truth, only words and fully editable media. Just look at how the obama birth certificate meme refuses to die, despite many news reports debunking it and actual high resolution photos being posted since at least summer.
Left largely unknown to me until relatively recently--much like the Philippine/American War [wikipedia.org] & Iran/Iraq War [wikipedia.org].
FYI, the media did report (some) on the I-I War as it was happening.
Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis.
'Nazi' is a political affiliation. Our habit of calling all the German soldiers 'Nazis' is like calling all the US soldiers 'Democrats'.
The SS was a specifically Nazi armed force, though they drafted indescriminately during the last months of the war. The Luftwaffe and Home Defense organizations were somewhat politicized, but not (I think) to the extent of the SS. The members of the army and navy were just dying for their country, which happened to be governed by evil men.
And very poorly governed, when it comes to the war. A sane non-ideological government would have surrendered in the fall of '44 at the latest, and saved maybe a couple of million soldiers' lives. (And who knows how many civilians.)
Hitler was Avantgarde. He and his marketing-message of merging socialisim and nationalisim was super-hip back in the day. And don't dare think for a moment that it only was hip with the Germans, no Sir. Aside from a sophisicated marketing machinery he was a breathtakingly unscrupulous dictator. He killed off the entire SA leader-cadre right after scoring the Machtübernahme. EVERYBODY knew he did it and ALL were scared shittless to even say 'Peep'.
Goebbels would've built broadband to every home and casted speeches of the Führer to every household and make the web a cornerstone of some Kraft durch Freude programm and at least 50% of the people would've loved him for it. And the rest of the world would've admired the Germans.
No, folks, Hilter, Himmler, Bormann and the Nazis were a very special type of evil people and they were outstandingly good it. Bin Laden, Ayatolla Comeni and Co. look like orphans compared. I have no doubt they would've use the Internet to their advantage and excelled at it.
Think todays Republic China or a healthy version of North Korea with the brakes removed and fueled by a nation of well educated people known for their drive towards technical perfection in most aspects of life - very much as the Germans are generally percieved - and you get the picture of what the Nazi Regime was made of. If anything, something like the internet would've fueled their agenda. I have little doubt in that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
didn't stop bush....
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
That is, if we were to have developed the A-Bomb 5 years earlier we could have saved over 62 million lives. Of course, by dropping it we would of course have caused German civilian casualties, unless we used it only in the war zones. But, as Spock said : "The good of the many outweighs the needs of the few"
jdb2
See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
I agree he still would have been elected.
However his support might have evaporated when news and photos and video of what he was actually doing in a lot of places after things got rolling were communicated to those people. He might not have gotten nearly as far as he did.
There are lots that say it could never happen in america because the military would never follow those orders. But the reality is, you could separate the military into the groups that would and the groups that wouldn't, and then deploy the groups that wouldn't of communication with home (helped by controlling the media), and then set the group that would to doing the atrocities you could get away with it. Hitler did just this.
The internet would have made it impossible for the portions of the military that wouldn't have gone along with it from being so completely out of the loop for so long. Even if you control the media, the truth still moves around on the internet.
Hitler would have had to censor / filter / and discredit it. It would have been an additional challenge at least; at best it might even have stopped him. But China is the obvious counter example.
What a random and unsubstantiated thing to claim. This reminds me of hippies who say the entire world would be peaceful if we all took LSD.
Just imagine Hitler trying to give his virtual Nuremburg Rally, it'd get Goodwin's Lawed straight away.
It would be like dividing by zero!
OMFG, YES!
Thank you for this post. I'm a child of an American soldier and a German mother. My German relatives were good people in every sense of the word. Wouldn't hurt a fly - literally (my great grandmother would catch flies and put them outside rather than kill them. She would sneak food to a russian soldier captured in the town because she felt sorry for him, despite the risk of the crime of treason). My grandfather fought in WWII on the german side and had lots of stories to tell.
I asked them all about WWII when I was a child and they said that honestly few people really knew what was going on with the concentration camps and such. It was as much a surprise to them as it was to the world at large when the story unfolded. I spent quite a few years conflicted because I thought they must be lying, until I decided the evidence available to me first-hand was superior to the much larger pool of second-hand evidence (ie. the popular media). They really didn't know what was going on, because they were just ordinary people living their lives as best they could.
This is why things like Gitmo really bother me. I never really understood how Nazi Germany could come about until I was able to witness the GWB administration first-hand. Consider that in the modern age we probably know more about Gitmo than the German populace knew about concentration camps in their day. We have a "secret prison", yet it has persisted for years and nobody has managed to shut it down for the outrage that it is.
This story really makes me wonder what the world would be like right now if it were not for the internet. Maybe all those apocalyptic sci-fi stories I read as a child would have been more prophetic than we thought at the time ...
Based on the presumption that only one side of the conflict would benefit from more efficient widespread communications. There is no reason to believe that Hitler's message of hatred would not have benefitted at least as much.
Someone should make a poster of it.
Also, "Hitler vs The Internet" would make a great B-movie.
if Hitler had the technology we have today, maybe he would've conquered the whole world.
Hm. Do we have an example of the Internet's influence on war? Say, Iraq? It stopped the US from invading under false pretenses, right? Nope.
It might have helped stop the abuses at Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, the story was quite successfully suppressed by the US authorities until it was broken by a foreign news service. There weren't so many of those active in Nazi Germany.
I doubt that the internet could have stopped Hitler. Simple reason: Too much information is as bad as too little. And when people are flooded with information left and right, they simply don't care. Especially when they have better things to do.
Especially Hitler and the WW2 is a bad example of a lack of information. It's not like it was any kind of surprise coup d'etat. Hitler actually seized power legally, through an election and by being appointed Chancellor. There was no overthrow, no revolution, no big civil war like in Russia. He was effing ELECTED Chancellor of Germany.
Didn't anyone know what that guy was about? Did everyone just think he was the usual loudmouth and populist? And nobody knew that he was an antisemitic madman and warmonger? Read "Mein Kampf", it's everything in there! That wasn't some kind of secret society leaflet that only a selected few may see, it was in a book he wrote over a decade before he was elected and it was for sale, and EVERY SINGLE piece of his plan was in there. Deportation and killing the jewish people, war against the Communists to get space for the German master race...
Nobody can tell me that if people wanted to have that information they couldn't have it.
Fact is, nobody cared! Everyone was struggling to survive, Germany was turned from a prosperous nation into a country struggling with crippling recession and inflation after WW1, so people didn't give a rat's ass about that. This guy offered them work and food, and promised a revision of the "disgraceful" peace contract of WW1.
It's not that people didn't know. People didn't care or even welcomed the ideas.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You know that three years elapsed between the beginning of World War II and the entrance of the US forces into the conflict, right? Pretty much everyone else was plugging the gap.
Along similar lines, Rwanda had at least three different UN-member military groups in place, but couldn't get enough support from the US or several of her allies to grant the mission there Chapter 7 status in time to avoid genocide.
In other words: the rest of the world does stand up and do things, all the time. It's just that nobody else pretends they're the only ones doing anything.
lol...yeah right...does it stop bush for the genocide on the middle east?,does it stop Georgia from the genocide in Osetia?.....oh sorry ,i now remember how the internet stopped irak from the mass destruction of my beloved America!!!.
The internet of that time was the ham (amateur radio) community. A German kid, Hans Shergold, was in a hospital in Poland with a case of inoperable acne. He told his step-father, Marshall Goering, that before he died, he wanted to get into Guiness for receiving the most QSL cards from around the world. As the cards poured in and the room filled up, the hospital staff had a harder and harder time getting to Hans to treat him. On 31 Aug, 1939, Hans suffered a serious flare up. The blackhead pressure alarm went off, but doctors and nurses could not get to Hans before his head exploded, just one, giant pimple. His step-father, furious at the Poles for not enforcing safety codes, appealed to Hitler for help. The next morning, Hitler called the head of the Polish Hospital Safety Code Office (Zgnblowski Trzblowski Schnappse Polska). Unfortunately, a translator misinterpreted a cordial remark by the ZSTP office, "we are very sorry for the Goerings", as "What a weinerschnitzel that Goering is".
The rest is history.
...just like it stopped Bush!
The internet has worked to accelerate anti-semitism and Islamophobia, I believe. I don't think the internet would have done much, but that's like saying what if there were cell phones during WWII? It's an idle speculation
So how did the internet do in stopping Bush and the Iraq war?
Sounds like yet another Nobel Prize winner musing outside his specialty.
if internet was around, there wouldnt even be a nazi party.
Read radical news here
You haven't browsed the internet much, have you (and I mean this seriously)?
While it is true that the internet as a whole is great at disseminating even obscure pieces of information, it is also great at disseminating noise, and there is no internet wide mechanism to actually keep the signal to noise ratio on any one topic high.
You're deluding yourself that, if only the "right" kind of information had been available to everybody, then there would have been substantive discussions and history would have been different.
Having the right information is not enough, people also have to be able to filter out all the wrong information, ie noise - misinformation, misconceptions, incomplete reasoning, sophistry, etc. The internet propagates it all equally, but in a debate it is not all worth the same, and it is hard to distinguish the two.
When the "right" information is only one among many "wrong" kinds of information, then even though everybody has access to the "right" information, they will not use it exclusively, and the end result will be discussions where the "right" information is not very influential, even though it's in plain view to all.
Hm. Do we have an example of the Internet's influence on war? Say, Iraq? It stopped the US from invading under false pretenses, right? Nope.
No, but I think coverage of the war has made invading Iran a lot less palatable to American's.
It might have helped stop the abuses at Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, the story was quite successfully suppressed by the US authorities until it was broken by a foreign news service. There weren't so many of those active in Nazi Germany.
The internet helped get the news out. It did take a bit of time for the US mainstream to pick up the story (a delay at the request of the DoD according to wikipedia), but pressure was building up, they couldn't have kept the lid on it indefinitely.
And the US media is generally still pretty 'free' and trustworthy all things considered, and if it were believed to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the state, the population would seek out and beleive foreign reports -- something they can do thanks, in large part, to the internet. Nazi germany had no alternative... either you believed what the media said or you didn't, but there wasn't any other source of news.
Not just that, but a major tactical advantage during WWII was the cracking of the Enigma encryption machine by the British. With today's Internet and strong encryption, it's actually far more likely that Germany would have been even stronger since there would be no way for the Allies to listen in on the German plans.
But overall it's meaningless to talk about how history might have changed with one technology. Technology has progressed across all fields (many times in a tightly bound manner). It's far more interesting to hypothesize what the outcome would be if each side were to be given access to all of today's technology (perhaps excluding nuclear weapons because they were crazy enough to use the back then and it would make for a rather short war).
A quick search gave this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/714025.stm wherein the UN Security Council admitted fault for the genocide. Kofi Annan is specifically criticized for not passing on just how imminent genocide was. How were the security council members to prevent genocide they apparently did not know was imminent?
As for WWII, pretty much all of Europe ignored Hitler until he came to their backyards. Right or wrong (I say wrong), the US did no differently than the rest of the big world powers at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Except, at our secret prison, we don't f!#king kill everyone. Sorry you're an idiot.
OMFG, YES!
Thank you for this post. I'm a child of an American soldier and a German mother. My German relatives were good people in every sense of the word. Wouldn't hurt a fly - literally (my great grandmother would catch flies and put them outside rather than kill them. She would sneak food to a russian soldier captured in the town because she felt sorry for him, despite the risk of the crime of treason). My grandfather fought in WWII on the german side and had lots of stories to tell.
I asked them all about WWII when I was a child and they said that honestly few people really knew what was going on with the concentration camps and such. ..
...
That really depends.
Asking tough questions was never a good idea in those years.
I just had to look up something myself: There's a fine distinction to be made: authorities never denied the existence of concentration-camps (AFAIK, the US had camps for most of the Japanese population in the US) and even used them as a deterrent. Death-camps, however, were top-secret.
Rumors of the Concentration- and Death-Camps made the rounds all the time (mostly through soldiers home on vacation - many of them considering the simple killing of civilians "unsoldierly") - it's just that people honestly believed all this was taking place unnoticed of Hitler himself.
A common phrase these days was "Wenn das der Führer wüsste - If the Führer would know that".
People didn't know, because they didn't want to know - maybe because they felt that there was something really big and horrible going on.
A lot of the staff in concentration-camps (guards etc.) could only cope with the emotional stress by consuming large amounts of alcohol (which was consequently distributed in large quantities), leading of course to more brutalities and stress.
To the credit of your Grand-parents, the death-camps were built in the most eastern places, on newly conquered territory - but concentration-camps were littered all over the country.
A friend of mine recounted that his grandfather (from the mother's side, IIRC) returned from the war and never ever spoke about what he did during the war until he died. The family believed, he was a guard in a death-camp. ;-)
My grandfather seldomly touched the topic, too, and when he touched it, he only told episodes about how he created some tool or fixed some machine with the rudimentary tools available.
This generation (which is mostly dead now) only wanted to forget the war and get on with life - and everybody (US included) agreed that this was the best solution at the time.
US soldiers led the local population of Dachau through the concentration-camp of the same name, a kind of "shock and awe"-strategy that was quite effective in silencing Holocaust-deniers and "Everything-was-better-under-Adolf"-apologists.
If the internet had existed back then, we wouldn't be able to read the data now
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
if the series of tubes leading to the series of showers were somehow clogged up...
I wonder how many friend Hitler would have had on myspace.
What i want to say: Hitler was not stupid. Goebbels was neither. To think about what somebody on Goebbels level of peruasiveness would have done on myspace - that *IS* scary.
I'm sorry, you'll have to justify your use of the phrase "overwhelming support". Hitler never even got 50% of the vote. And (speculation) judging from his later acts, I expect he got that 50% using dirty tricks and lies. If the internet had been around at the time, his political enemies would have made damn sure the truth got out.
I fully expect that an internet in 1932 would have shown a deep divide between Nazi's and Nazi opponents, and certainly would not have simply been a lovefest for Hitler. He stole their democracy, pure and simple.
Last post!
Are you sure they meant our internet? Because certainly some areas would be quite enthralled with Hitler's plans. I'd rather think of it as a support system.
Obama has shown a mastery of media and propaganda on par with Hilter. Look back the the fainting audience members, the teleprompters at whistle stops, the very carefully controlled media imagery to make him look more important than his current office and life experience genuinely suggested appropriate. None can ignore the ubiquity of the Marxist-like "HOPE" signage. Even now he's out there with his bogus "Office of the President Elect" (there's no such animal -- the Electoral College haven't even fully voted) and there's his faux "presidential" logo and use of a government domain "Change.gov" which may or may not be legally appropriate. He got elected on image, not substance. He is potentially the most dangerous Western threat to liberty of the 21st century. Every one here should keep a very close eye on the "Change" he brings.
Of course. One look at goatse or 2girls1cup, and Hitler would have crumbled!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germany
Specifically, Hitler got in because his party got 37% of the vote, and then Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor. Then he used a crapload of dirty tricks to get more and more power, up to outright arresting or murdering enough of the government that the rest were a high enough percent to grant him more.
"Hitler was voted in!" is a huge misrepresentation of history. It would be like, in the US, if someone got elected by one state as a representative to the House, then appointed house majority leader by his party, and then everyone else above him died, and then people were to later say the whole US voted him in as President.
Because, you know, the internet has led to a global population that is immune to the effects of forceful deception and propaganda.
Hitler would have won the war because if the Internet was around then he could have easily downloaded the plans for a Nuke and Blammo!... end of war.
I just hope the Internet can stop (prevent) World War Three
No he wasn't. He was appointed. He was as elected as that nutcase Scalia.
That's not true. The Iraq war has lasted longer than the second world war. During that time, the majority of Americans were gung-ho about it for at least the first two years thanks to a lot of patriotic news coverage, and as you know Bush was reelected on that platform - which occurred whith a lot of debate in the public media. In the last two years at least, a majority of Americans have not been too happy about the war any more since it's been clear that it hasn't been going too well and has cost too much.
The Germans in World War II were pretty happy with the war in the first two years, since they were winning. They were pretty unhappy in the last two years, since they were losing.
Wrong. There were foreign radio broadcasts that the Germans could listen to, as well as underground news sources. Everybody had alternatives, but few cared as long as the war was being won, just like in America.
As you can guess, I don't buy the whole it can't happen in America meme.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think recent event such as the 9/11 attacks and the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, certainly have had an effect on these two sentiments, but the internet has only been a tool for dissiminating information. I don't think it's fair to blame the internet.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Goodwin's Law would like a word with you. ;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The Internet? No, that would not have worked. Vista, however, would have stopped him cold!
Why is it that everyone assumes Hitler would've died a peaceful, quiet painter if he'd been better at art? Is there some reason that a more successful artist couldn't develop fascist, racist viewpoints? Or that all anyone needs is an outlet? You don't think young Adolf had like-minded friends to talk to, or vent at? You think that an anti-semite couldn't find a sympathetic ear in Germany in the 1920s? No, the internet generally reinforces horrible viewpoints, because no matter how horrid or weird your thing is, you can find a community of like-minded asshats to make you feel normal. I certainly don't remember furries being a loud and proud part of the community before the internet. I've been exposed to more nazi, jew-hating, gay-baiting, misogynistic, racist, ignorant guff on the internet than I could hope to find in a thousand lifetimes in meatspace. And while I'm at it, can't people qualify what kind of Nobel winner in the headline? Peace, literature and physics winners command varying levels of respect from me, and this sort of opinion would be more interesting if it came from an economics winner, for example.
OTOH if Internet existed at that time, the communist revolution would have swallowed the whole world.
(1: the corruption that destroyed communism from inside would be efficiently fought, 2: the West would be getting objective image of the East, and after Black Thursday there would be more than a few willing for the change.)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
But my common sense detector fails again. So now I'm doubly disappointed - The world's going mad a little more quickly than before, and that my favourite website missed an opportunity!
Internet did not stop Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister (again) in Italy despite his crime records and his links with italian organized crime that can be easily checked online.
As outlined by others, Hitler would have probably had a nice blog and got even more popular.
Evil dictators are often quite good at selling themselves and using the media for bending the thruth; no, I don't think internet would have helped.
Excerpt from 'To Be A Muslim' by Fathi Yakan:
"Working for Islam is a must from the Islamic point of view because the existing political and economic system and manmade laws operate functionally to deny the wisdom of Allah on earth. This denial makes it compulsory for every Muslim to establish functionally Islamic society in every country on earth and to restore the Islamic way of life taught by the prophets. It is also every Muslimâ(TM)s responsibility to remove all impediments to the worship of Allah alone, by every human being in belief, behavior and social life.
Since transforming every society into a functionally Islamic community and governing in accordance with the law of Allah, the Almighty, is a must, therefore every effort to accomplish these goals, according to the shariâ(TM)ah is also a must. Whenever the accomplishment of something compulsory is impossible without accomplishing something else, that prior accomplishment is also compulsory.
The Muslim countries have been ruled by manmade systems with elements borrowed from the Romans, Chinese, French and many other cultures. The economic systems in these countries are capitalistic, Socialist, or a mixture of both evils. This overlay of secular cultures makes it all the more necessary to abolish all traces of such primitive life (labiliyya) and to reinforce the understanding and application of the eternal and universal Islamic din until it becomes the ruling power throughout the world.
The application of the Islamic din depends on the elected ruler or leader. Their election depends on the existence of Islamic power, which alone can implement the shariâ(TM)ab as an Islamic system throughout society in every field, whether it be economics, family law, war, disarmament, or international law, or any other, throughout the world."
We can read that goal of ISLAM is to rule the whole world.
Here is this book:
http://web.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/to_be_a_muslim/part2/ii.htm
Notice that this webpage is located in Canada:
http://www.who.is/whois-ca/ip-address/youngmuslims.ca/
Anyone care about such stuff then? They are allowed to post Nazi like ideology in Internet because there are using so called 'free speech'?
Internet would have never existed without WWII.
IT study had a boast during the course of the war because england wanted to crack the enigma code.
In fact people, at least here in Europe in that period, felt that a war was necessary, to leave back old traditions and sets of mind, a thing like the Internet would mean that they were already on with the evolution of human thinking, and this wasn't possible.
The two concepts are hardly linked, too hardly to speculate on them.
Now, where's my cheezburger?
Show some respect. Idle is helping to protect you from Hitler.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Does the existence of the internet stop Robert Mugabe for instance?
My grandfather would agree that most soldiers weren't "fully-fledged" nazis (being still alive at the age of almost 90). He had to fight in WWII, and with "had to" I mean they didn't give him a choice. It was either you fight for the nazis or you get a bullet through your head. It wasn't like you could apply for service in the army, and they would kindly let you in, instead they grabbed everyone who could hold a rifle. He and his father actually were against Hitler, and tried not to support him. The result: His father got into a camp were they beat him up until he changed his mind, my grandfather had to stand (like in not allowed to sit down) in class because he refused to join the Hitler Jugend. Maybe, with the internet, they could've organized some resistance. On the other hand, there's a great risk involved in doing something like that in countries ruled by a crazy dictator.
Mein Kampf kind of laid it out folks. I guess if Hitler's book was on Amazon people would have read it more? Believed it more?
If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries before the invasion of Poland, and one of history's greatest tragedies might have been averted.
This has got to be the dumbest thing ever posted on Slashdot. So we are to believe that the international community of appeasers would have taken him more seriously with an Internet?
1) Send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries
2) Those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries before the invasion of Poland
3) Appease Hitler
4) ???
5) Profit.
And why again are we even posting the silly ramblings of a friggin poet on Slashdot?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Yes, I can see it now....
"I will create a race of supermen...."
"LOLZ UR A FKN LOLFAG N0000BZ! I R00LZ! I PWNED U M@NN" ...then Adolf feels an idiot and we never hear from him again.
a country which..
- did not attack USA,
- did not intend or plan an attack
- nor supported enemies of USA
for 90% of population, their internet today is just a manipulative mass media as all other mass media
US media is very distinctly biased and partial compared with the media in other Western nations - just go check European news outlets like BBC and TV5 (if you can speak French) and you'll see what I mean.
Let me just point this out: most issues are portrayed in the US media as having two sides - a Democratic and a Republican. How often is any other point of view considered in most mainstream news media in the US?
That said, the media in the US is not a mouthpiece for the state in that it does not constantly parrot the words of those current serving as elected officials. It is instead a mouthpiece for the establishment: Democrats + Republicans + lobbyists
All you need is money. You can look at the Conservative party of Canada by brainwashing people into what just happened in Parliament was undemocratic with the Opposition forming a coalition to bring down the house. He successfully convinced up to 1/3rd of Canadians that it's undemocratic and another third had no clue what to think.
While a coalition is perfectly democratic and how our parliamentary system works, all it took was a lot of money and a lot of private groups going around the internet spreading FUD on various websites such as youtube.
Sorry, but the American news media may be free, as in legally unbound, but the people in charge of it do not have the publics' best interests at heart. That is a whole other level of not-free.
As for going to other foreign news reports, again, sorry, not the case. How many Americans even heard of the The Downing Street Memo?How many war-supporters think the BBC is some sort of biased left-wing communist news service? Wars like the recent Iraq invasion are generally not reasoned out by the populace based on information which they assess. It is based on emotional triggers, fear-based responses and appeals to nationalism. These things do not give Jo American an incentive to seek out independent corroborating evidence from abroad.
Hitler wasnt some isolated idiot with opposing views from those of other countries. Most of his views was shared by most european countries aswell as most of the US population and govt.
What angered other countries wasnt the holocaust at all but more the fact that hitler was attacking everyone in sight. The holocaust is something that history has rewritten as something most people opposed while in fact it was rather accepted at the time that whithe race supremacy was true and proved.
I highly doubt the internet wouldve changed anything at all. Mostly because people of the time was just as evil as Hitler.
HTTP/1.1 400
How exactly does someone who writes about "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" become an expert in history? Hey, he's entitled to his musings just as much as the next person - but it's hardly newsworthy.
What's next? An insightful review of "War and Peace" by Nobel physics winner: "It's a big book".
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
So, c0d3g33k, you are equating Jews to Al Qaeda?
Gee, I can't imagine Anne Frank killing anyone.
Also it is not Gitmo, you git. It is "Guantanamo Bay Naval Base". Use the correct term!
But, yes, I do agree that most German citizens didn't know what was going on. I just feel you are using a very poor & insulting comparison.
Look at the chinese government... they could do pretty much anything to anyone and except starting another WW, there's not much anyone could do to prevent that, with or without the Internet.
A petition? Seriously?
As a matter of fact, all kinds of such things *were* tried at the time. The problem is that things like personal appeals and shunning only work on people who actually give a damn. Not only did the H-man not care, but he knew everyone else did care, and used that against them.
(sigh). The first volume in Churchill's history of World War 2 (The Gathering Storm) should really be required reading in the west.
So there.
-- Boycott Shell
Not to burst your bubble, but to say that most Germans didn't know what was going on with the Jews is disingenous. They surely knew that Jews were being relocated and weren't asking too many questions on where they were going. Jews were being shipped at the rate of tens of thousands per day into concentration camps. Entire neighborhoods were culled and Jewish property were transferred to Germans. You cannot in good conscience tell me that most Germans didn't know what was going on, maybe it wasn't 100% of all Germans who knew but Hitler didn't just wave a magic wand and make Jews disappear. Hitler's racial policy were very clear since the beginning and millions of Germans signed up for it. It's my personal belief that the Holocaust was not a uniquely German event, it could happen anywhere else in the world. That's why we must alwas be vigilant and face the truth, no matter how horrible.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat ... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
So, just because "a Russian classmate" says something, you accept it as 100% correct and factual? My gullible young friend, you need to learn something. People in the ex-USSR talk more b.s. than anybody on the planet. They believe all rumors they hear. It's quite common to hear urban legend stories repeated as happening to the husband of a friend of my cousin and so on.
Can you name exactly ONE of those supposed memorials to German troops? Whether there are any or not depends on what you mean by the term "Eastern European". If that means Austria, OK, maybe. If that means any of the Warsaw Pact countries, then that is almost certainly untrue. The USSR suffered horribly in WWII, partly from the Germans and partly from Stalin, but they blame all of it on the Germans. I feel pretty confident in telling you that Soviet authorities would not have allowed memorials to stand to German troops. There's just too many hard feelings.
It's certainly true that many places welcomed German troops - at first. Ukraine suffered horribly under Stalin prior to the war and they did welcome Germans as liberators. What they didn't know was that Hitler viewed all Slavic people as fit only for extermination. After a few years, the Soviet Union looked better to these people and they started partisan movements to fight the Nazis. At least under the Soviet Union they wouldn't all die. Stalin was crazy, but he was not Pol Pot. A former girlfriend of mine is from Ukraine and one grandmother had both of her parents killed in front of her by Nazi troops. One grandfather had both of his parents killed in front of him by Stalin's henchmen. There's plenty of blame for both sides. And this story about German Jewish soldiers being allowed to serve elsewhere, well, I find that improbable given the irrational hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. But that's typically a Russian story for you - nobody is as bad as they really were. I'm sure your classmate has glowing things to say about Stalin, who in my opinion exceeded even Hitler in being evil.
Hitler was not elected. Hitler was appointed to the Chancellorship by President Hindenberg, who hated his guts. It took years for the Nazis in the Reichstag (who didn't have a majority, just a plurailty) to align behind Hitler such that Hindenberg would be forced to appoint him. This is due in large part to vonPapen deciding to be a Karl-Rove-like figure in Hitler's government rather than take an overt position of power.
It was all done with only a 32% plurality in the Reichstag. Those were the ONLY elections involved. The rest was done through backrooms deals, fearmongering, and political theater for the German public.
Given the nature of the Internet, there would be a conspiracy theory out the next day about who was really behind the Reichstag fire. Unfortunately, rather than naming the Nazis, the blame would be placed squarely on reptilian space aliens in human form. The German public would be busy with disturbing niche porn sites and the plan would have proceeded as in the historical record.
If someone was fighting for the German army during WWII they were either Nazis or happy to go along with Nazi ideas.
End of story.
And Russia moved into Eastern Europe as part of the war against Hitler, who had decided to invade Russia in the first place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Would Internet stop Stalin, that's the question. His regime was directly responsible for more genocide than Hitler's. You'd have to be quite ignorant of WW2 history to assume it was only about Hitler's imperialist ambitions.
This technology was invented by Shampoo.
My grandfather died in a concentration camp. He fell off a watchtower.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
... cough
Let's not forget that outside of the nuclear bomb, the Germans were largely technology powerhouses for much of the war.
I have a feeling the "internet" in that time would likely have vastly sped up their rapid prototyping capabilities, including being the first out the door with nuclear capabilities.
In some sense, it was largely sheer luck that the US was able to win the nuclear weapons race.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Even with all the info available to modern man, internet could not stop Bush
Enough said - point made.
This is clearly not the case. When Bush and his cronies started spouting lie after lie to trick congress into supporting his bid to go into Iraq, a great many people saw his agenda through the lies and started hollering about it on a global scale. The Bush administration's response was to mount a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign, using every media outlet at their disposal to repeat the mantra "WMDs, WMDs, WMDs" over and over. It was basically a shouting match between those screaming "Liars! Liars" and those screaming "WMDs! WMDs!"
Had the Internet existed, you can be certain that Herrman Goerbells (goballs, gerbils, I can't recall the spelling of Hitler's Minister of Propoganda) would've been well aware of its existence and its power, and it would have been another tool in his kit.
You all sure seem to like the idea of attaching his photo to the story. You even placed a larger photo, here, atop the story page. That is blatant admiration, glorification, and praise to me. Now we know who is behind Slashdot!
Here's an analysis of the situation and the politics behind the scenes: http://war-on-pakistan.blogspot.com/ Let us see, LIVE, if this war can be prevented, and criminals brought to justice using the internet. All of you Indians sitting there in California, what do you think? Can we do something about these crooks spread all over Pakistan and Afghanistan? This time, it's not Darfur, it's your very own Mumbai, commercial capital of the back-office of the world - India - the scums that robbed your call-centre / support jobs and the scums who want to give your nuclear scientists and engineers some really good jobs.
First be free, then strive to serve. Serving without freedom means adding to the problem. Or so I thought.
Specifically this: http://war-on-pakistan.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-this-just-indias-war.html The similarities between now (Obama) and then (Kennedy) are just too much to ignore. My opinion of course. And yes, I'm a stinking, brainless, peace-mongering leftist nutcase :-P
First be free, then strive to serve. Serving without freedom means adding to the problem. Or so I thought.
Unfortunately the Internet is festering with fanboys and human propaganda zombies. Hitler would have conquered the world faster with fewer bullets.
ten things i can think of that came before the internet.
10 Teletype, Imaging if the german war machine had telettype instead of those enigma machines the orders to battel fronts would have been faster and more swift.
9 Missles, rockets and other dumb bombs that were set using timers. think v-2 on steriods.
8 Peace protest would have been more enabled in our land delaying us from doing what is nessary to win the war and stop hitler. look at what it is doing toward iraq reshaping the very way we fight war at the speed of thought.
7 Nuclear power planets would have powered flood lights enabling our planes to be shot down by computer controled direct fire and radar.
6 companies like IBM would have been top dog due to them helping hitler so IBM software would have been the domninate group.
5 Health care for the Germany army would have been way better than it was then, enabling them to fight longer and harder.
4 They would have dropped the nuclear bomb on us first before we did on japan there by saving japan.
3 We would be up against Mexico too if the dominance lasted much longer and hitler would have been able to convince the Mexicans to fight us at the speed of light.
2 the genocide woudl have been much more efficient on the german army's behalf.
1 We woudl have to learn german and speak it to be understood by our puppet government.
TSS
Godwin only says that Hitler's mention was inevitable, given a long enough discussion.
If we're not going to talk about Hitler, and the standard reference of evil he represents, we're doomed to repeat Hitler.
These idiotic corruptions of Godwin's observations that long discussions eventually mention Hitler stand in the way of the Internet helping us enough progress to stop such evil from coming around again.
--
make install -not war
Didn't stop Bush from launching pre-emptive illegal wars or torturing people. Same crimes the nazis were hung for. Hasn't brought him to justice to answer for his crimes either.
This summary is using a flawed argument. The invasion of Poland may have started the War officially, but it was no more than the logical consequence of the past six years of national socialist rule in Germany. Hitler did not come to power by military power (in fact, he tried and failed to do so in 1923); he was elected by people who were disillusioned, ignorant, dirt-poor thanks to the Depression and the first World War, and desperate for someone to "lead them to greatness".
This, in turn, would have been prevented by free access to information and communication. After the war, people claimed they had never known about the millions of people killed in concentration camps - with Google Earth, IRC and social networks, they would have.