Prison did in fact convince Hitler that armed rebellion was not an effective means to seizing power in post-WWI Germany. He had been jailed for the "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich, which had in turn been inspired by Mussolini's successful "March on Rome".
After his release he decided to focus instead on gaining power through the political system, an effort that was ultimately successful.
So prison "tamed" him in that sense, but of course it did nothing to reduce his political ambitions. If anything the opposite appears to be true - he wrote "Mein Kampf" in prison, which laid out his vision for what the German state should look like, including such details as gaining "lebensraum" - more living space for the Germans in the East.
Yesterday I was in a theatre for a unique showing (at least where I live) of a documentary on greece's golden dawn party rise to power (they have 17 (18 at first) people in the parliament). Party leaders clearly stated that votes is the path to power and legitimacy. They know this and they use the argument in the rethoric: wer are nationalist, not neo-nazy or racists and people do vote for us.
The fact they are neonazis... I don't see the connection with grabing power through elections (I mean, it's not a neonazy strategy... any parties can do that). But they read mein kampf. But again, I don't know how it plays out in their violence and their conceptions of the state. And yet the parrallels ar striking.
Interesting that the article seems to state that Hitler AND Luddendorf had led the Beer Hall Putsch, as my understanding is that he sorta fell into it and was pawned.
While Luddendorf was certainly in agreement of Hitler's rhetoric re: restoring Germany's former military might, my understanding was that Luddendorf's role in the Beer Hall Putsch consisted of Hitler waving a gun at him, putting him in another room when he refused to join his movement, and announcing to the audience gathered at the Beer Hall that he Luddendorf had agreed to lead the rebellion.
Luddendorf then agreed to it when he saw the support, and the following day when shooting broke out at a police standoff with some couple thousand Nazi's, Luddendorf strode through the volley of bullets to the police line where he surrendered himself promptly.
Or atleast that was the narrative that was presented to me in William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It still amazes me today how anyone could walk away from such an incredibly embarrassing failure as the Beer Hall Putsch, but it seems to have been something of an acceptable occurrence at the time. I mean, Hitler often spoke as death as the only alternative to him achieving his revolution, but ran off after the first shot was fired to his country home!
Hitler was even received well when he was tried, and given a very lenient sentence. I guess for Germany coming out of WWI, violence was a far more acceptable and commonplace thing than it is in my world
> Aside from the murder of the prime minister, the attempted coup d'état came to nothing, and the rebellion as a whole proved a failure. The participants took a taxi to the police headquarters and surrendered themselves to the Kempeitai without a struggle.
Did they wore clown shoes too? This seems almost to silly to be true.
I believe you care correct about Luddendorf. That was the narrative outlined in 1924: The Year That Made Hitler, if Peter Ross Range is to be believed.
Don't believe secondary source A more because you've found secondary source B agreeing with it. To really validate a statement you need to figure out source A's primary source, e.g. a police report of the event. Then compare it to primary source of B. You may end up seeing that both A and B are actually referring to an unchecked secondary source themselves, maybe even the same.
A valid point if I was working on any academic research. Or if the history carried any relevancy beyond a curiosity. I understand the concern with secondary source, however that was specifically why I added a disclaimer stating "if that author is to believed", or something to that effect. Regardless, thanks for taking the time to explain your concern as it may help others.
Well, nobody asks you to write scientific papers if you don't want to.
However, don't believe the story about Luddendorf is correct, just because you've read it in another secondary source. The level of doubt about the first mention should stay exactly the same as long as nobody has done some background checking.
They could both be citing different primary sources, did you ever stop to consider that? Or were you busy stuffing that strawman? Let me know when you've checked the primary source on both. Then I'll listen to your pedanticism. Until then you're being just as speculative as I am. Except, I at least cited a source and provided a disclaimer for the information I posted.
A) Yeah, they could have, true. I also could become a billionaire tomorrow at 10:31 am. But the probability is so close towards 0% that it's much smarter to not assume it.
B) Strawmans are awesome. Don't dare to criticise my strawman. I'm an artist!
C) Yes, adding more reading material is always nice, and none of my comments was supposed to discredit that. Thanks for adding it.
D) Still, don't increase your hopes because you've read another secondary source.
How well known was Hitler in Germany at this point? He was a relative nobody in WWI, so I'm curious how he can have been a 'demi-god' just 5 years or so later.
After WWI, the political situation in Germany was pretty volatile. Lots of extreme politics. Hitler started giving talks about German politics and how Jews were to blame for everything. At this point, his only income was a soldier's pension iirc.
He was the 55th person to join the Nazi party (he later forged his membership card to say he was #7). But the Nazi leadership (more organizers at that point) were impressed with Hitler's speaking abilities and thought they could use him to promote the party. So they started setting him up at different venues and events.
He developed a reputation for being a guy with strong opinions about politics and his speeches were pretty entertaining for people, so more showed up. All of this was pretty local to Munich at this point.
Eventually Hitler and some of his friends got this idea that they could overthrow the government, hence the Beer Hall Putsch. He wasn't really famous at the time, but he was a popular figure in certain circles, so when the Putsch failed, he was sent to prison instead of being executed for treason.
In prison he wrote Mein Kampf, essentially painting himself as a figure who loved Germany persecuted by a government that had sold Germany to foreign powers. As a best selling author, he became a celebrity.
Ian Kershaw's Hitler Hubris and Nemesis is really good if you're interested in the topic.
> painting himself as a figure who loved Germany persecuted by a government that had sold Germany to foreign powers
I wonder just how popular the "sold homeland to foreign powers" narrative was throughout history. Kind of reminds me of the sentiment some of the people I know have towards the situation in Poland - the narrative is that all our industry was sold off to foreigners and that the government should reverse this process to bolster the economy.
It's a pretty common narrative. And it's an easy one to exploit. Hitler used anti-semitism to make it an even more poignant narrative. Instead of a distant foreigner, the Nazis got to point at foreigners who were living amongst them: Jews. And that, in particular, was a very, very old narrative that the Jewish people had been forced to suffer many times before.
One of the most interesting classes I took as an undergrad was a history course that focused on the challenges that faced Jews during and after the diaspora, and how they met those challenges while somehow managing to preserve their culture, faith, and a shared sense of identity over the course of--literally--millennia as a minority group inside other cultures and empires. Maristella Botticini's The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 is one of a few rather fascinating books on the subject.
I sometimes wondered whether it is this focus on education and a religion that rewards gambling authoritarian-rule-systems that lead to continued persecution, while other not-integrating minorities where completely ignored.
That's not even true, North Korea has many exports. It exports raw materials, textiles, and garments "above board" to China and South Korea. It exports technology and weapons less legally. Drugs, counterfeit currency and pharmaceuticals, small arms, ballistic missiles, fighter jets, etc.
While I understand you are listing things in a general sort of way and may not quite mean it but I'd love to see a source that they export (or have developed manufacturing capability) for a fighter jet or jet engine
True, but the complaint is real - I guess it's the disconnect between the perspective of regular people vs. the factual state of things. Which seems to be a big issue these days.
The putch was almost succesfull and by that time Hitler was already leader of the party. Not just some guy speaker, but leader able to give commands to SA. I think that the way you describe the putch as some joke attempt you are underestimatig support Hitler had in Bavaria.
The first mentions of Hitler in the Simplicissimus, a fairly widely read and well-regarded contemporary Munich-based journal, appear in 1922, and this picks up the following year. Since the Simplicissimus is mostly satirical in its gesture, this suggests that Hitler was already established enough to become the target of ridicule. More specifically, they are poking fun at him being seen by some as a saviour of sorts, and criticise the handling of his attempted coup by the (Bavarian) authorities.
"Was quasseln denn die Krittler\\vom bayerischen "Schorf"?\\ Hier gibt es keinen Hitler\\und keinen Ludendorff.
Was unken denn die Käuze\\vom Monarchistenputsch?\\Kein Mensch malt Hakenkreuze.\\Was futsch ist, gilt für futsch.
Ihr hört die Konstatierung\\nur zweifelnden Gesich's?\\So fragt halt die Regierung:\\die weiß von allem nichts.
Fragt nur den Herrn von Knilling,\\der wiederum Minist-\\er und sein eigner Zwilling\\von anno achtzehn ist."
(cf. Ratatöskr: Zur Beruhigung, in: Simplicissimus, vol. 27, München: Simplicissimus-Verlag, 1922--1923, p. 500)
He'd led a violent (albeit somewhat pathetic, and suppressed) attempt at a coup---that's why he was in jail. Rough comparison points in recent US history would be the domestic terrorists like McVeigh and Kaczynski, I suppose.
Those are domestic terrorists rather than that they would be attempting a coup. Exploding bombs, writing manifestos and killing random passers by are usually not good ingredients if you want to take over a government.
If anything Hitler was - like some present day politicians - an absolute master at identifying frustration in various strata of society and harnessing that frustration to propel himself to power.
While I agree the domestic terrorists are a poor example, Hitler's coup was envisioned to be a bloody one, particularly the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler's actual ascent to the highest position of the Weimar Republic was mostly a matter of it's instability. They had come out of WWI disgraced, Schleicher had been too busy grabbing power from Papen, Hindenberg was dying... there were a volley of power shifts until the ball was finally passed to Hitler, whereby he promptly deflated it and had Hindenberg sign the Reichstag Fire Decree before the man gave up the ghost.
The race and class politics was strictly a proxy for the only thing Hitler ever really spoke about: power by all means.
Is there any evidence of Hitler's true, innermost intentions? Did he admit or was he even aware of his lust for power for power's own sake?
I know it's often a mix of both with demagogues, but I wonder how much he saw the fight against supposed enemies (Jews, Communists, Slavs) as a virtuous and net-positive goal vs. a means to an end.
I don't think you can follow any one thread or theme in Hitler's decision making like you can for his lust for power.
For example, he found himself in the National Socialist party for nearly no other reason than they welcomed him for his charisma and he saw a weak leadership he could exploit.
The exposed nationalist & socialist ideologies, economic principles & race discrimination were things he quickly pushed aside time and time again when he felt they didn't align with power gain.
Some things like socialist and economic principles were ignored more often than nationalism and race discrimination which centralised his power.
I don't think anyone could ever accuse Hitler of being an ideologue or zealot for any cause other than his personal interest.
Then again, listening to half of an audiobook on the matter isn't really the same thing as living or properly studying it, so kindly tell me what's what if you're in a better position to speculate.
> he found himself in the National Socialist party for nearly no other reason than they welcomed him for his charisma and he saw a weak leadership he could exploit.
It's incredible with what precision some of these sentences can be transplanted nearly a hundred years and be just as applicable. You wouldn't know if this was about the past or the present when taking that sentence out of context.
The stronger a country's political institutions the easier it then becomes to gain power by those means rather than through violent means. Violence works best in countries that have very little structure.
He was already well known in Bavaria where putch happened and already the leader. Not known in the whole Germany yet. If anything the whole thing helped him to consolidate power within far right wing.
This comment seems historically substantive at first but then veers into trollish weirdness. Please don't do that, especially not on inflammatory topics (of all of which this is the mother).
Except a process for producing fertilizer had been invented by an ardent German nationalist named Fritz Haber and had been productionslized by Karl Bosch. The Haber-Bosch process had been scaled up to produce explosives for World War 1. Haber also spent the war developing chemical weapons for Germany. Despite this, he still won the Nobel Prize for Haber-Bosch process in 1918 due to its applications to agriculture and solving the fertilizer crisis.
This doesn't change the fact that land was still valuable enough to fight a genocidal war over it. But it does make it more poignant that after Haber invented the pesticide Zyklon A, it was reformulated and used to murder his family. Haber, like many Germans who served their country in WWI, was Jewish.
That is the easy answer. The west, due to cold war realities, has placed far too much on hitler's shoulders. He was evil but no comicbook supervillain. By blaming everything on the core nazis, most all conveniently dead, we can more quickly forgive everyone else. The reality was that they each stood atop a large social structure. They were products of history, not super-evil monsters dropped into the scene deus ex machina. It is too far to say that "Germany" wanted genocide, but the answer has to be somewhere between the bookends of "Hitler wanted X" and "Germany wanted X".
Well thats the point. Because even if todays borders are considered "untouchable" through international law, that was not so much the case in the beginning of the 20th century.
In fact re-drawing borders was exactly what seemed a completely legitimate way to "penalize" Germany/Austria for the Great War. So it is no wonder that Germans had no hesitations about the "land-grabbing" part of Hitler's policy - land grabbing was totally legit, ey?
Of course, putting those guys in charge of operation land-grab which had the most vile hatred of them all was on part of the German populace naive at best and complicit at worst. But then, what opposition to expect, if the Nazi-genocide's first victims were Germans, basically muting almost all opposition by emmigration or death.
Also, about the in retrospect outlandishness of the Germans for wanting to grab land from its neighbors - what did Germany's contemporaries do right after WW2?
Demanding to shift some borders: The USSR+UK at the expense of Germany and Poland with Germany loosing 30% of its territory. France incorporated itself the Saarland. The Netherlands wanted to increase itself by ~30% at the expense of Germany. Belgium had plans for annexation and even tiny Luxembourg saw fit some expansion.
Lol. I'm just glad for any reply that doesn't scream at me for "defending hitler". There are certain subjects that go south very quickly on the internets. I only realized afterwards that I had poked a very big bear.
I haven't read Mein Kampf and my understanding of the final solution was that it was the last of several 'solutions', most of which didn't involve genocide so is the 'desire' for a genocidal war that accurate?
Secondly, what of his twisted advisors? I think it would be fascinating to read tertiary literature of sentiment in that era and how people with those sentiments gained influence.
I think you might be misunderstanding what "the final solution" was meant to solve.. it was not meant to solve an economic problem per-we but to solve the racists view of the Jews by killling them all.. so i think it is fair to say that the final solution of killing all the Jews was most definitely involved a desire for a genocidal war.
Well first of all, you are right - the 'final solution' was one of many solutions for the 'Judenfrage' and it wasn't like the NSDAP put the most extreme solution on the ballot box.
Secondly, the 'twisted advisors' shouldn't be seen as a few extremists, but rather the then-current alumni of a school-of-thought that was in the making for at least hundred years before WW2: Reactionary nationalism driven anti-semitism (as opposed to the anti-semitism that roamed europe before the 18th century).
Within these 100 years multiple people discussed 'solutions' and often the legitimate ultima-ratio seemed to be capital punishment, if the Jews weren't leaving by other means (As today some politicians would legitimize shooting illegal aliens at border-crossings).
All the anti-semites need to do to gain influence was to add fuel to the flames of the 'treason'-narrative.
As a Canadian, your last sentence is comical. I know the US media pushes the Trump = Hitler meme, I really don't buy it though. Worst case, he might just be another GWB.
I really think the worst thing Trump may do for America is make everyone think George W Bush wasn't that bad. The guy is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. He and his administration did objectively terrible things. Trump so far has proposed a few awful ideas and has spoken in a way that is awful and at times terrifying but he hasn't actually done much, yet.
We really can't forget how awful the Bush administration was.
Normalizing neocon policies and forgetting various failures of the GWB era actually feels less dangerous than normalizing transparent and blatant lying and demagoguery and the precedent for handing the country over to whatever reality TV personality blames immigrants the loudest.
I judge presidents by their intent. The reason we all hate politics and politicians is because they have an impossible job, of choosing between nothing but bad choices. GWB made a lot of mistakes. But I believe he always had good intentions and wanted to help society.
Trump seems to be the modern day Andrew Jackson, and seems to have only personal gain as a motivator in his life.
>The latter is saying that they had bad intentions.
Does it really? Sometimes good intentions can end up with objectively terrible outcomes because nobody can see into the future. The proverb "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" comes to mind.
I think there's a lot of truth to that proverb because the vast majority of people don't think of themselves, or the reasons they do things, as "evil" or bad. In their internal logic most people act for "good reasons", but "good" can be a rather subjective thing, so the internal reasoning doesn't always translate properly to the outcomes in external reality.
The troubling thing is that presidents are so often consumed with an idea of greatness that is completely antithetical to that. They want to be remembered as a great leader. Not as some lame victim of circumstance.
To have heroes we also need villains. It is terribly unfair, but maybe that should act as a warning. If you hold the lives of thousands in the balance your own reputation will be linked to the fate of those people.
"The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is a United States Congressional statement of policy stating that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq..."[1][2] It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, .... "
Good example, as far as the historical record is concerned, GWB thought that they had WMDs. Any claims that it was started for another reason needs evidence or it ventures into conspiracy theory territory.
The idea that Saddam had nuclear weapons seems like more of a conspiracy theory to me, since there was never a single piece of evidence for it. Saddam did have chemical weapons that USA helped him use against Iran, but experts agreed their shelf life had expired and they had aged to the point of uselessness by 2003. Lots of other nations that haven't been invaded do have "WMDs", so anyone reasonable would certainly suspect "another reason".
I don't recall the official line ever being 'nuclear weapons'. It was always 'chemical weapons', which were redefined to be 'weapons of mass destruction' in order to then be grouped with nuclear weapons and have some of that fear become associated with them. The irony, of course, was seen in the US bragging about going into Iraq with the largest conventional munition ever made, the MOAB (mother-of-all-bombs).
The Iraq war was used to bolster voters for the next year's election - the US had been punching ghosts and getting nowhere in Afghanistan after 9/11, so they switched targets to one that looked similarly foreign and, more importantly, couldn't hide.
You don't recall all the back-and-forth about the IAEA? Hans Blix had visited this site and El Baradei had visited that site? Really? Do you actually remember that time, or do you just remember later reporting about it? Because in the news I watched in 2002-3, it was all IAEA all the time.
Yep, I remember that, and the inspections had a timeline that would have concluded in several months after the US invasion started. The US's allies were asking it to wait for those inspections to conclude.
Then, of course, the US ignored them because "he's going to hide the evidence", invaded for its own reasons... and famously found nothing. Blix was painted as an incompetent by the US, but even after stomping Iraq into dust and having full control of the country, the US found nothing.
It certainly can be, and in this case it was. The GWB administration kept ignoring evidence and demanding new evidence until finally evidence could be manufactured that fit their policy goals. (This isn't a partisan judgment, since this tragedy was repeated as farce in the lead-up to the Democrat Party's war in Libya. Still, leaving the Libyans to their own devices after the horrible meaningless unprovoked war has probably been better for everyone than what we've done instead in Iraq.)
It's easy and comforting to dismiss the idea as hyperbole, but there is a lot of concrete evidence pointing in the other direction.
He's not Hitler--he's something new. But anyone who has studied history a bit recognizes similarities in rhetoric and tactics. Given that he is the commander and chief of the most powerful military in history, it seems natural to ask whether there might be also be similarities when it comes to political and societal goals. Given the stakes involved, I can't see how playing it down and hoping for the best is a wise approach.
he's a right wing populist demagogue, of which there have been countless examples. almost none of them were hitler or anything comparable, and while i am not looking forward to the next 4-8 years, it's not like he published a manifesto on the proclivities of the jew or proposed annexing mexico. quite the opposite on both counts, in fact.
Trump has repeatedly promoted using nuclear weapons against adversaries without any nuclear deterrent [0] and refers to people he doesn't like as animals [1]. What do you call that? Sounds like the pretext for genocide to me.
i don't know what to tell you dude, he says stupid shit constantly and i think you should pay more attention to actual policy proposals and implementations than his idiotic tweets and context-free clickbait articles with the most hyperbolic statements that could be extracted from the record for your own sanity. if you're worried about a "pretext for genocide" i'd be way more worried about someone like duterte.
There's no comparison. How many right wing populists have had an organization like the NSA at their disposal? While he's clearly got some work to do in bringing the military and intelligence communities to heel, the potential danger if he's successful is extreme.
The reason the comparison is downplayed is because Hitler committed genocide and attempted to exterminate an entire race. Not only did he do these things, he talked about them before he had gained political power.
Now I am no Trump fan, and frankly think he's one of the worst president's we've ever had. But that doesn't make him Hitler; because as far as I am aware he's never said anything about wanting to commit genocide.
"Exterminate an entire race" - if your referring to Jews, then it is sad that you adopt Hitler's position that Jews are a separate and distinct race. That position is the start of a slippery slope that ends with them being sub-human and "other" than "us".
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and this is the first time I've been compared to Hitler. Not sure if I should be proud (of the fact that this is the first time) or sad.
It's difficult to see much similarity between what the Trumpets have done and what the Nazis had done by the time they won their election. Moreover, we rarely appreciate how vile the politics of the western world was in those days.
On the one hand it was the age of Organisational Man, who worked for big companies, or states more centralised than any in history. Indeed, with colonialism still not dead, a realist thinker might imagine that iron-fisted empires were the way of the future.
On the other hand, racism was still acceptable, not just among right-wing thugs like Hitler, but also on the left from the progressive eugenics movement, genocidal communist fantasists like H.G. Wells and plain-old to American bigots like Woodrow Wilson.
In those days it was fashionable for intellectuals to think that liberal-democracy was a has-been that could not organise well enough to Do What Needs To Be Done (and what "needed" to be done, was of often genocide).
It was in this cultural milieu that the Nazis and Bolsheviks rose and did what they did. Conditions like that don't exist in the West any more. I can see trends that might lead back to similar conditions -- but it will take a good 50 years for them to mature.
The problem is that we're never going to see conditions like the ones that led to Nazism or Bolshevism again. It's not that easy. It's like trying to identify the next Facebook by looking for companies who are copying Facebook--the next Facebook will be something completely different, just like the next infamous totalitarian dictator will be completely different.
If we're going to sit around waiting for the guy to commit genocide and start a world war before we take the threat seriously, it will be far too late to do anything about it. We need to look for leading indicators.
The tendency to treat Trump as inherently illegitimate and to ignore the voters behind him is just the kind of condition that might lead to future horrors. You might argue (though I wouldn't) that Trump's silliness is also such a leading indicator.
But so what? In a democracy both sides get their chance to push pull.
He's illegitimate to the extent that he attacks the democratic order itself. Even if Trump had actually won more votes, it wouldn't give him the right to ignore the constitution--by, for example, violating the Emoluments clause or interfering with congressional investigations. This isn't the normal ebb and flow of popular support, it's an attempt to fundamentally change our system of government.
While I agree, it's also way too late to start brandishing the Constitution about. A cynical observation: neither Democrats or Republicans give one fig for the Constitution, until The Other is in power.
Case(s) in point: the FCC, FDA, minimum wage laws, Federal involvement in education.
None of those is Constitutional without some laughable legal gymnastics around inter-State commerce, and yet very few people have been complaining about their existence over the years.
As a non-American observer, the whole system seems reminiscent of ancient Rome at the point where it had become an Empire but was still pretending it was a Republic.
While I completely agree that the constitution has been trampled on for a long time, I think there's still an important difference between those who pay lip service and those who brazenly defy it. Past administrations have at least felt the need to justify themselves, even if their justifications stretch logic to the point of absurdity. When the argument is instead "we don't need to justify our actions" I think that represents a stark and dangerous shift away from the rule of law.
Personally I think a feigned respect for the rule of law is actually more dangerous, as it allows people to rationalise their support of politicians and parties with little actual respect for same.
Take Obamacare as an example. Leaving aside the issue of whether socialised healthcare is a good idea, Obama had to circumvent the law by instructing the IRS to collect revenues via an executive order.
Is that really a precedent that should have been set? Even socialists should have been a little uneasy at the disregard for the Constitution there, but instead, the ends won out over the means, and it went ahead.
If Canada wanted nukes we could have nukes. CANDU reactors produce an abundance of plutonium and the technology to extract that.
The thing is if Canada had nukes then the US would treat Canada a lot differently in any potential conflict. It'd make a first strike with nuclear weapons necessary instead of something that would be massively disproportionate.
Bush didn't employ actual fascists like vitez Gorka of the Vitezi Rend, a Horthyite organization that helped the Nazis kill Jews, in his administration.
I think the truth in this point lies in the fact that this was when the British Empire was still around and held large swathes of land with sway over large numbers of people.
That plus the German Empire lost large amounts of land after the great war.
It wasn't insane to pursue land. Not at that time.
The reasons, "science" and supremacism that surrounded it? Yes. Unfortunately, the kind that sweeps a broken, defeated nation under a spell, a mass delusion of grandeur.
Insanely barbaric, when the "more room" part means taking it from other people. And when it's rationalized by racial and national mythology, then yes, it is absolutely insane.
You have to get pretty creative to explain why the US are sprinkling missile interceptors ever closer to Russian soil without considering "mad power drive".
Canada does have enough nuclear material to dirty-bomb-style wipe out the eastern seaboard of the United States. Canada is the only country that wouldn't need to move their arsenal in order to perform an immediate no-warning military invasion of the United States. This assault may not win anything for Canada, but it would decimate the United States, and so in a game of mutual destruction, Canada has a card.
I've been told by un-citable sources that this is a pillar of Canadian military strategy and the primary reason the United States will not attack Canada.
Dirty bombs are a pretty empty threat and are a terrible first strike device. They don't "wipe out" anything. They are mostly area denial plan. Nobody would die immediately. The US would be able to fully retaliate with regular nuclear weapons. They wouldn't even need to do that. The USA could defeat the Canadian armed forces in several weeks and then ethnically cleanse the country to make room for all the refugees from the dirty bombed cities.
You'd also wouldn't be able to coat the entire seaboard with enough radiation to be all that dangerous.
If Canada really wanted a nuclear deterrent, it could just build or buy a nuke. Hell the USA would probably give them nukes with the codes. It's done so with other NATO allies in the past.
dirty bombs are totally ineffectual at anything beyond freaking people out per multiple studies. [1] the US wouldnt invade canada because canada is already essentially a client state that rarely doesn't bow to the US, and there is practically no added value in invading compared to the current arrangement. 90% of canada lives within 50 miles of the US border for a reason, and it aint just the weather. whoever told you this has no idea what they're talking about.
We are one people (other than Quebecois) divided by an arbitrary border. In some sort of nationalist upheaval I could Americans wanting to "reunite" with Canada or something like that.
Or if the midwest grain fields stop yielding enough during a global drought, the USA might turns its eyes to newly thawing land up north.
It would look more like Germany taking over Austria than Germany invading Poland in any case.
By 2021 over a million positions are expected to be vacant as employable candidates opt for positions in the US and Europe. It appears global plans for Canada's destruction are proceeding satisfactorily.
Pure "fact-based" reporting is in no way a solution.
For example, take the following paragraph; "The Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered a disaster in 2011, causing dangerous radiation leakage. Even six years later, radiation levels are high enough to be instantly fatal. Even brief exposure can cause genetic damage leading to cancer. The radioactive dust from the disaster has been carried eastward, and has been detected throughout the United States. This radioactive dust has likely been deposited in millions of houses across the country. However, the United States has no plans to initiate a domestic cleanup."
There are only facts in that paragraph, but it paints a very misleading picture of a domestic emergency that simply doesn't exist (the domestic radiation levels are so low as to be harmless to humans). Pure "fact" reporting doesn't solve this problem.
How the hell do you report ALL the facts in any scenario?
Any publication in existance will have to pick and choose what to report in order to keep a article to a manageable level.
Do you think Scientific Abstracts are all factually correct? Hell no. There is actually a very well known issue with scientific experiments and articles where scientists will simply repeat experiments until they get a result that is within acceptable p-values and simply submit an article on that one experiment, ignoring every single time it was wrong.
You don't need to report ALL the facts. You just need to report the pertinent ones. And the fact that domestic radiation is not fatal is pretty fucking pertinent to the passage in the OP.
Exactly. But the issue here is that you are dealing with two different mindsets. On one hand, you have the paragraph above that 'stands alone'.
But that has no bearing on the truth. It's omitting key facts to be true, and creating a social situation like 'reacting to a non-existent threat'.
So to me and you, ridiculous paragraphs like those above are In Error, because they are Unfinished and Missing Info. But to others, they point to the paragraph above as some kind of 'sole entity' that exists on it's own.
No one cares about a paragraph that omits critical facts to portray the reality of the situation. But apparently, on the Internet, some do.
Chuck that incomplete paragraph in the trash and try again, that's my response to their nonsensical verbal antics.
Truth is not measured by the production of cognitive dissonance. "Cognitive dissonance" is not even a validated phenomena, it's just barely more than psychobabble.
After his release he decided to focus instead on gaining power through the political system, an effort that was ultimately successful.
So prison "tamed" him in that sense, but of course it did nothing to reduce his political ambitions. If anything the opposite appears to be true - he wrote "Mein Kampf" in prison, which laid out his vision for what the German state should look like, including such details as gaining "lebensraum" - more living space for the Germans in the East.