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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.
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
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.
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.
. 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.
It can! Think about it, Hitler was an artist first, got stymied in that (due to lack of talent). The genocide and warmongering came afterwards. If the internet had been around, he would have been able to get his art published online and his art degree from university of phoenix. Even if he still got rejected from art, he may have set up an emo myspace page, an antisemitic/ conspiracy theory blog, and troll on /., and that would be as far as it got. In other words, if he had an outlet for his crap, he might never have gotten around to taking control of the government and the holocaust.
The internet: great at distracting would-be dictators with pr0n, lolcatz, and angry blog posts.
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?
Dude, we tried that, and it SORTA worked. In the original WWII, Hitler won.
... 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.
In fact, look at Obama's rise and the fervor people have for him. If you'd prefer, look at Ron Paul. These examples obviously don't have the maliciousness of Hitler, but it does show how stars and cults of personality can form rather quickly. If anything, I'd think that it would have helped him overall.
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.
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
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."
You won't find that in the history books
I found those in my history books and my history teacher made sure to mention it specifically. I even grew up in one of the most conservative counties in the US.
Strange... I read this in many history books. Here in the US. High school and college. I even was required to write a paper on it. Where did you go to school?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Of course like we all know what went wrong in world-war 2 was a single man. How realistic does that sound.
We all know what the problem was, what caused world-war 2 : an ideology. There are however 2 problems many people have with that : ... now the effects are known ... not so much)
1) it is the very basis of progressive ideology that "all ideologies are equal" (of course except anything that's not currently identified as "progressive". Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's
2) the name of that ideology of hitler was national socialism. Of course progressive ideology is socialist.
I personally think we're not just going to see just how wrong this claim is. That the internet not only does not prevent racist and abusive ideologies from spreading, but that the internet can actually make ideologies spread faster, hit harder and with less that can be done to stop it. Also the internet makes sure that the size of an ideology does not have to be that big anymore for it to do real damage : having few members does not prevent communication like it did in the 1930's.
We will see that more ideologies, instead of just islam, will find the means of terrorism. They see the success terror can give an ideology, and some people will stop at nothing to push their ideas on others. The internet empowers these people, it does not weaken them.
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?
My experience is the same as other posters. My history classes always underscored the fact that WW2 was largely provoked by the Treaty of Versailles.
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!!
it can stop just as many as it causes. I mean seriously, this is how it would go on the Hitler forums: "Its all teh Jews faults!" Reply: "nah ah! U r a moron. Germany sux. Hitlers a douche. GTFO"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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.
Its far more likely, Hitler would seek to control the Internet in every country he controlled. It would be a dream come true, for the Nazis to monitor all communications. Hilter did after all, try to create a Totalitarian level of control, even without the Internet!. The Internet (for all its early utopian dreams) is (as the news is showing) turning into a means to monitor and datamine large numbers of people, in an automated way, while providing an automated means to censor anything they wish to suppress from within their own country.
Its extreme idealism to believe the Internet would therefore stop Hitler and fails to take into account Hitler's nearly Psychopathic behaviour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
"The psychopath is defined by a psychological gratification in criminal, sexual, or aggressive impulses and the inability to learn from past mistakes. Individuals with this disorder gain satisfaction through their antisocial behavior and also lack a conscience. Psychopathy is frequently co-morbid with other psychological disorders (particularly narcissistic personality disorder). The psychopath differs slightly from the sociopath, and may differ even more so from an individual with an antisocial personality disorder diagnosis. Nevertheless, the three terms are frequently used interchangeably."
I think Hitler qualified for aggressive impulses! (to say the least!), plus an extreme lack a conscience, combined with extremely narcissistic perception of his own importance!.... give that kind of person a means to automate the control and suppression of anyone who attempted to speak out and the Internet would allow the creation of hell on earth!.
By the way, while Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is a Nobel prize winner, he is a Nobel literature prize winner!. Getting him to quote on technology and psychology, makes about as much sense as asking a Nobel Peace Prize winner to carry out Brain Neurosurgery!.
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
I created a new utility suite based upon the idea that we can go back in time and create the internet before Hitler's rise;
C:\>rping Adolph Hitler -t 12-09-1932/17:32:00
Reverse Pinging Adolph Hitler with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Ping statistics for Adolph Hitler:
Mode: Crazier than a shithouse rat
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in years:
Minimum = 76 years, Maximum = 76 years, Average = 76 years
I was going to send a reverse-bootp to his mother and hope he would have been hatched.
Tisha Hayes
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.
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 ...
Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's ... now the effects are known ... not so much)
I don't think most people really know what eugenics is, or the beliefs that are behind that sort of thinking... nor how close most people are today to being just as firmly believing in eugenics and it's backing ideologies.
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.
Dude, the mistake you made is you should have sent Al Gore back in time to invent the internet sooner, instead of sending Mel Gibson back to have sex with Hitler's mom! If you're gonna build a time machine, THINK before you violate the law of causality! It's not like you'll ever get a do-over on interfering with the past!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
It wasn't me, it was my uncle. Well, it wasn't me YET.
I think the question should be "when", not "where".
History may change with increased temporal distance...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think that is what presidential campaigns aim for in general though. Have you seen the supporters at the rallies? When people start carrying signs that say McCain or Obama or whoever, my ears tend to close because that means the campaign is becoming more about the superstar than the (real) issues.
As for this article talking about the internet and stopping Hitler...I dunno. It's a bit like a fire. If it's small, it would probably put it out like blowing out a candle. But if it somehow gets big enough, wouldn't it be just like fanning a fire?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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.
Eugenics has morphed into "population control". It turned William Shockley (co-inventor of the transistor) insane. It is still with us, and look at the stated goals of Warren Buffett and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
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.
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.
Seriously? You're going to call Ron Paul's movement a cult of personality?
I guess that shows that Internet or not, we're still shallow enough to believe what we want to believe.
It's been a long time.
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
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.
What would you call it? The Ron Paul Revolution isn't named after the issues, it's named after the man. It's based on a real desire that people have to see more conservative/libertarian principles in place, but that doesn't stop it from being a cult of personality. That same fervor didn't translate into the libertarian candidate.
Gee, I get the same Mode when I ping George W. Bush. Nice to know the Internet stopped him from doing anything crazy or illegal.
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.
Fortunately, the internet counters this empowerment of sociopaths by increasing the opportunity for exposure to different ideas, and by applying social pressure to the particular information that gets spread widely.
People have always been able to isolate themselves with like-minded kin, in the forms of cults/religions, and in the education/brainwashing of their own children to raise people with similar ideology. If anything, a vulnerable individual participating in an online community is much less isolated than one participating in an actual cult, allowing them access to a wide range of information sources which will inevitably conflict with any ideology too far removed from common social norms. As a group tries to expand itself through online recruitment, they must ultimately advertise their ideology on more general interest sites, where they will have to compete with arguments from people with more socially acceptable views.
In any online forum where individuals interact, there is always a pressure to conform to social norms (in the sense of avoiding sociopathic tendencies that negatively impact other individuals, not necessarily any kind of moral judgment on socially acceptable behavior, the latter of which is widely open for discussion). On Slashdot, for example, any antisocial commentary is immediately moderated down to invisible comment purgatory (for those with default viewing prefs). The same holds true in most other forums as well, even in the case of those forums without peer moderation, as antisocial behavior is repudiated and/or ignored (if they don't get themselves banned). The pressure to avoid sociopathic ideology is very real, and almost completely ubiquitous on the web.
The way information spreads on the internet today is that individuals are determining which information appeals to them, and either passing it on directly to their social connections, or flagging it of interest on social news sites. Inevitably, information that is socially positive will spread much more readily than sociopathic information, which simply dies a quiet death of irrelevance. Most people outside of an ideologically homogenous group will simply not spread antisocial information, making it quickly fade away with counterarguments and resistance once one tries to spread it beyond that group. The fact that information fed to people on the internet must go through a populist filter to be widespread means that sociopathic ideology hardly stands a chance at mass-appeal. Increasingly, only a secular humanist agenda has any chance of making it to the mainstream through internet information distribution. There will always be small groups of gullible or brainwashed outliers, but they will always be just that, and popular sentiment will inevitably be against them. In the context of the article, in reference to an entire society adopting a sociopathic ideology, I would argue that the decentralized nature of information distribution on the internet, dependent on populist appeal, is absolutely a very strong check against widespread antisocial ideology.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!
Maybe the fact that they lack the maliciousness of Hitler might have something to do with it... No one tried to make an argument against the fact that ideology can spread very quickly and potentially unexpectedly on the internet, but instead that sociopathic ideology is disfavored on the internet. Comparing Obama or Paul to Hitler, and then to cults of personality, is quite a stretch given their public service and total lack of overtly socially extremist views. The only difference between the rise of Bill Clinton to prominence in his party from relative obscurity in the primaries to that of Obama is that we're seeing a shift in power towards appeal to populism rather than to entrenched power brokers like party officials, centralized media owners and large campaign fund donors. Not that the support of the latter is any less crucial than previously, but simply that it is no longer enough to buy traditional media coverage when popular sentiment becomes so apparent on the internet. It's becoming harder and harder to dress up a turd sandwich into someone people feel like lending their support to, especially as our exposure to these candidates becomes much deeper, governed more by the information's popular appeal than by their political campaigns' access to media outlets. That support has become significantly more crucial as information distribution is decentralized to the populace.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Actually, it was highly effective in stopping Bush.
Abu Ghraib was exposed by Email. Atrocities in Iraq were exposed through Blogs. The steady flow of information through non-propaganda channels slowly turned the public opinion against him.
It took six years to stop him completely, but it helped stop a lot of what was wrong long before that. It exposed faux-rescues and provided a channel for information other than the state-influenced public media channels.
There are a lot of reasons the military wanting to ban soldiers from accessing the internet.
The internet isn't a force by itself but it does fan the winds of change.
Perhaps if the Internet didn't exist then sixty years from now we'd be talking about Bush like we now talk about Hitler.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Germany had massive debts that lead to insane levels of inflation that made their currency worthless while they paid back huge national war asshole taxes to the allies of WWI. German was the rapee of the end of WWI and they weren't even responsible for it starting. That's the general gist of what my high school history class threw at us.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
Of course. One look at goatse or 2girls1cup, and Hitler would have crumbled!
I'd argue the reason the libertarian candidate barely has anything behind him is the exact reason Ron Paul runs as a Republican: Nobody other than the big 2 gets any media coverage. Hell, even the Republican Ron Paul was quickly squelched.
I've got better ideas than Paul, but I'm a nobody who will never hold office. Hey look, it's the leader of the libertarian party sitting next to me on the bleachers.
It's been a long time.
Hitler would have fit right in on 4Chan.
i think we have new motto for deviantart
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I strongly agree with your post, other than to say that it's still possible to be isolated on the internet. Closed groups and forums with selective membership can still be a breeding ground for antisocial tendencies. They can slowly absorb people with like minds, while simultaneously rejecting those people who may offer counter arguments to their ideals.
I do agree that the internet does make this harder to achieve than, say, compared to the environment of early 20th century Germany.
Gosh, I don't even know what to mod that. Insightful? Funny? Interesting? Under-rated? They all fit the bill so nicely.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I just hope the Internet can stop (prevent) World War Three
Hitler was constantly trying to goad countries into war before his own imagined death, rushing Germany's military buildup forward without financial regard. It's really impossible to declare that the Internet could have "stopped Hitler" because his was the kind of personality that dictated such grand world plans. He had a future planned for the German people extending beyond his life.
The way he took control of his party and eventually his country might even have been empowered by the Internet. I suspect Hitler would have exploited such a communication medium. I think the Internet strengthens cults of personality as much as it exposes criticisms of them. To act like we're in such a great, enlightened time is silly. In my opinion, the Internet has made people even more gullible in many ways.
you know people always want to go back to when hitler was an adult. Right before the war. Here is an idea... try going back to when he was a 5 year old kid playing alone in the woods not surrounded by soldiers, etc
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
Funny, I was thinking the opposite.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Goodwin's Law would like a word with you. ;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
But then again we wouldn't be afraid to use nukes yet, plus america wouldn't have such a huge bill and supposedly be the most powerful nation.
Shoot Yourself In the Foot
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!
Ubiquitous encryption and darknets are gonna make this effect even more pronounced. Insular groups will be able to get more insular, requiring closed circuits of credentials and so on.
But likewise, their grip on their own members must weaken; In 1939, a German youth who doubted what he was being taught, would know better than to ask the important questions or search for validation for his misgivings. But if he were able to talk anonymously and securely on /b/ with some proxies Yer durn tootin' the opposition would have new and powerful ways to associate.
I guess I'm saying you got the nail on the head.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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
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
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
I wonder how you can honestly claim something like that on a forum like slashdot. Let's not pretend that all opinions get equal "respect" on slashdot.
Can we at least agree, for example, that slashdot's moderator's position on copyright enforcement is ... not all that subtle or balanced.
And there are many other standpoints that are basically not allowed like it. I'm not saying slashdot (currently or in the past) breeds antisocial tendencies. But a forum like slashdot could easily do so.
Hell, just check out islamic forums. Or truther forums. One contains loads of kill gays and stone women, the other ... well you know. And yes, that's a tendency.
Forums are no cure for antisocial behavior. In fact they can easily amplify it by isolating groups of similar mindset.
Read the comments here for example : http://www.topix.com/forum/iq/baghdad/TASKRSD7AUN7VBTJE
Of course that raises the question whether it's immoral for muslims to kill gays. If you allow "freedom of religion" which really means freedom to choose for yourself what is immoral and what is not, obviously you cannot condemn the killing of gays or the stoning of women, since they choose killing gays and stoning of women to be very moral acts instead of immoral. If not, you're basically expecting muslims to condemn the paedophile prophet for being a slave-trading kidnapping thieving massacrer. And if you truly believe that (which is an obvious truth) how could you possibly be a muslim (and NOT a sociopath).
Yet this ideology, including the killing gays, stoning and beating women parts, is spreading, especially online, where those people cannot easily be shamed for what they're saying. In the "real world" it's in retreat.
However the question is what will happen if the internet starts taking preference over the "real world".
"the Internet counters this empowerment of sociopaths by increasing the opportunity for exposure to different ideas"
I agree with you, but your position is fundamentally flawed, as you have not looked at the bigger picture, which is needed, when dealing with someone like Hitler. You focus on everyone discussing at the same level on a forum, but someone who seeks power over others (like Hitler did) doesn't think about playing by the same rules as you and everyone else.
If you truly want power, you seek to control the company that provides the entire forum or better still, you seek political power, to give yourself the power, to control all companies that provide all forums, in your country. Or better still, you seek political power, to control all companies in your country, that provide any kind of Internet access to any website anywhere in the world.
Hitler and people like him, are so angry and arrogant towards others, that they care little for the views of others. This behavior often pushes them away from (as they see it) wasting their time listening to the views of others (who disagree with them). (Ironically it creates a feedback behavior, where the less they listen to others, the more they think they are correct all the time, as they can never learn they are wrong).
Someone who seeks real power, plays by entirely different rules. They are not interested in individuals and their point of view on a forum. An individual has no power *on their own*. A large group of people however, has power. The people who seek real power, seek to control groups of people. By controlling the point of access to the Internet, they can hide their entire country, from any view which differs from their own. The news this year, about many forms of Internet controls, proves this is what is happening, even now. Many countries are working towards finding ways to censor views, that differs from their own point of view, of what they consider acceptable. Plus some countries are also seeking to monitor everything people say and view online (like for example, the UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's total Internet Database plan and the Phorm ISP built in spyware, ironically setup also in the UK, the home country of George Orwell). These databases and Phorm like ISP spyware style companies, provides the means to workout which political group everyone fit into. Then these groups can be dealt with, usually by divide and conquer tactics, to fragment the groups, to make them all feel that they cannot make a difference and have other things to worry about in their lives. (In the case of Hitler, he wouldn't try to divide up or hold opponents back, he would have just kill off all opponents he could find).
Which brings me back to your point,
"the Internet counters this empowerment of sociopaths"
No, the Internet provides a means for sociopaths *in power* to monitor, profile and then control and so effectively silence everyone who they do not want speaking out.
" by increasing the opportunity for exposure to different ideas"
No, the Internet provides a means to censor out all views, that the ones in power, do not want their people to see. So while you are right (in theory) about sociopaths using discussion forums, being exposure to different ideas, you are totally wrong, (in practice) as sociopaths like Hitler, play by entirely different rules. In their hands, the Internet greatly boosts the empowerment of sociopaths *in power* .
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
I'd argue that the typical /. moderator's position on copyright infringement is more consistent with social benefit than that of the copyright holders, who have attempted to keep our culture under lock and key for increasingly obscene lengths of time, while attempting to fight the tendencies of people to share culture with each other. A profit incentive is great and all, but let's not forget the original intent of copyright law, to maximize creation of art and culture, and eventually have it enter the public domain where everyone can benefit from it.
As for the morality of persecuting gays and women, I'm sure those that argue for such ideas meet with more resistance in online forums than in the case of some hate-spewing imam, where social pressure might encourage one to keep their head down. The anonymity of the internet allows people the freedom to question ideas that might conflict with their personal inclination or upbringing. As cultures meet online, ones that encourage barbarism like the stoning of women are at a significant disadvantage, as they are burdened with the alienation of large portions of their own society, women and gays in this case. Moral or not, you're inevitably pissing off a lot of people who find themselves holding the short end of the morality stick. A more inclusive ideology is at an obvious advantage, even if it might conflict with that of traditional power brokers in their society. As young people are increasingly raised on the internet all over the world, inevitable exposure to ideas like equality, the power of enticement over coercion and the value of meritocracy can't help but take new roots where they might not have previously.
I won't argue that there is no hatred being promoted online (that would be insane), but merely that there is increased resistance to it as regular people are free to express themselves without fear of pissing off some psychopath, and that given a shift to information distribution governed by popular support rather than centralized control, the opportunity for large segments of the population (like women and gays) to effect change in their societies increases dramatically. As those countries' citizens start getting their information from more socially driven sites, traditional power holders will rapidly evolve their discussion to a more inclusive one, or fade away to irrelevance. It's the mechanism of broad-based social control over information distribution which combats sociopathic ideology, not merely access to the network in general.
As for the internet taking preference over the "real world", the real world is being built on the internet. The world of today is as dependent on the internet as much of the 20th century was on the telephone and television. The internet is the reality of present and future human interaction. As the internet becomes increasingly pervasive with mobile devices and ubiquitous network coverage, its relevance in our society has become paramount, to the point where the fabric of our society is dependent on the network. There is no going backwards, only further down the rabbit hole.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
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
yep, whole story needs to be arrested for violating that particular law.
The Digital Sorceress
Without Hitler, the US wouldn't have been the first one to have nuclear weapons.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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."
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
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.
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
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.
Hi Mindkata, I cant help but see that you've been chasing me all over slashdot again, modding down as much as possible because you have a vendetta against me. I think that's so sweet I put you on my friends list.
But it might be for nothing, since from the start of my newest slashdot persona has been doing 4s and 5s for the last three weeks, almost exclusively. I've been modding you down with that one, and will continue to forever.
By the way, I see that you're still an armchair theorist who can't manage to get anything right. Your posts are generally very long and entirely without meaningful content. It's still painfully clear that you're not really qualified to comment on anything.
Goddamnit. Well, it was over with mindkata anyhow; he's been going in little myopic circles for days now. I suspect I might have done some real psychological damage there, so I'm pulling out. Sorry, MK, gotta truncate it. I know you were having fun.