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With what we know today we could see Orwell picture of Germany was incomplete. People did not want struggling at the time. After the Great depression created b

With what we know today we could see Orwell picture of Germany was incomplete. People did not want struggling at the time. After the Great depression created by the banks bubble and having everything they could produce taken by countries like France as payment for WWI GERMANS WERE ALREADY STRUGGLING. Germans were dying in winter because the coal was sent to France as payment. And this is not like winter in Morocco. In Germany you have no energy in winter, with 30 Celsius degrees under zero you die. Not only they were struggling, but having all what they could make confiscated to pay debts created a very dangerous situation, there was NO HOPE. They had become slaves. Romans already measured that a slave worked way less than half what a free man did. So Hitler brought hope. He stopped paying the debt(default), the military occupied the coal areas back for Germany and brought hope. Is not that he promised suffering, but that he promised that suffering will end. He also made suffering more tolerable making it social. Hitler created social programs for workers that let them travel and meet other people. It is probably hard to understand for Westerns, but there are millions of people in Africa or India that are happier than people from the West, even while being very poor, because money is not everything, there are friends, for example, that people from Africa have more than isolated westerns. Today the world is in Great Depression number II. Countries are over indebted, and we have the same problem they had: economies had stop to a halt and will be there until bad debts are cleaned, and defaults are issued.

toyg 12y ago
Undoubtedly part of the German electorate responded to Hitler in despair, as you say; however, you cannot discount the fascination he inspired in the middle classes by appealing to their sense of glory. He took that element from Mussolini, who developed it in a country that wasn't on the verge of despair as much as stuck in a lull and lacking self-confidence.
tim333 12y ago
I imagine Orwell knew much of that stuff which was to a large extent predicted as inevitable by Keynes both in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace and before. It often surprises me how much suffering could be avoided if people just understood Keynes stuff and used it. WW2 and much of the recent depression could probably be avoided and with pretty much no downside. It's kind of mass unnecessary suffering through wilful ignorance or something like that - dunno. I guess some of the ideas are hard to understand and most people couldn't explain the concept of insufficient aggregate demand leading to lower jobs and investment and hence lower demand still in a feedback loop unless it gets broken some how. But it's not that hard I would like to think. Though I have not heard that concept repeated and dealt with by many of our current leaders. Maybe human brains are not built to grok that stuff even though you can pretty much put it on one sentence?
gorhill 12y ago
> we could see Orwell picture of Germany was incomplete [...] [It's] not that he promised suffering, but that he promised that suffering will end. Looks to me that it's what Orwell described in that excerpt (at the end of the essay): > at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner.

toyg 12y ago

Undoubtedly part of the German electorate responded to Hitler in despair, as you say; however, you cannot discount the fascination he inspired in the middle classes by appealing to their sense of glory. He took that element from Mussolini, who developed it in a country that wasn't on the verge of despair as much as stuck in a lull and lacking self-confidence.

tim333 12y ago

I imagine Orwell knew much of that stuff which was to a large extent predicted as inevitable by Keynes both in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace and before. It often surprises me how much suffering could be avoided if people just understood Keynes stuff and used it. WW2 and much of the recent depression could probably be avoided and with pretty much no downside. It's kind of mass unnecessary suffering through wilful ignorance or something like that - dunno. I guess some of the ideas are hard to understand and most people couldn't explain the concept of insufficient aggregate demand leading to lower jobs and investment and hence lower demand still in a feedback loop unless it gets broken some how. But it's not that hard I would like to think. Though I have not heard that concept repeated and dealt with by many of our current leaders. Maybe human brains are not built to grok that stuff even though you can pretty much put it on one sentence?

gorhill 12y ago

> we could see Orwell picture of Germany was incomplete [...] [It's] not that he promised suffering, but that he promised that suffering will end. Looks to me that it's what Orwell described in that excerpt (at the end of the essay): > at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner.