tarvuz

How balanced would online forums strive to be? If someone posted a flame about the Nazi party being dangerous would they be banned? What if the internet existed during other times of horrible oppression that are now famous in our history books? Just curious.

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Sun Tzu

I don't understand where your going with this. If you have a subject your wanting to comment on; but feel it's going to be potential trouble- PM it to a moderator first and get their input.

If I'm reading into this wrong; please excuse me. What if's just dont seem to go anywhere.

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Marcus_Aurelius

If the net had existed when the Nazi party took power in Germany....there would have been a lot more of them, all over the world. They were masters of propaganda and what better way to spread it than the internet.

Sparhawk

I'm not so sure - the Net has had a great "fact-checking" capability in it - in that hundreds of thousands of folks can simultaneously verify the claims of our public leaders. I'd like to have faith that the Germans of that time would not have been so easily manipulated had they access to such independent media.

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MSD

Regardless of techonlogy, people would still have been the esily-persuaded, gullible, brainwashed Nazis that they were, and the Third Reich would have done exactly what it did, plus some internet censoring.

irateplatypus

i think the third reich would have been weakened from the start. effective propoganda often relies on controlling the information sources people have access to. with the internet, it would have been much easier for people to read things that don't tow the party line.

also, it affords someone a certain degree of anonymity. people would be more ready to criticize the nazi's as they took power and people would be more free to read dissenting opinions without raising suspicion about themselves.

i look to oppresive governments around the world and their harsh censoring policies... i think the internet causes a lack of order in the arena of competing ideas, but it does much to enforce accountability on those who might otherwise be outside of its jurisdiction.

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tarvuz

I don't have a real point. I am just curious about various aspects of what is considered the great evil of the last 100 years. One aspect is how forums do not want flaming against one person's or group's viewpoint. Secondly, I am curious as to how or if it is possible for such horrible things to happen in the Western world in the modern age.

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seep

The internet's done a lot for the popularity of Naziism in our age.

HeWhoHasNoName

Assuming that the Nazi party hadn't simply run all of the nation's net access through government filters and firewalls, with monitoring stations in the SS offices, it may have made a difference.

I don't know what kind of affect it would have had. Most everybody in Europe outside of the Reich already knew that Hitler was a threat. With Soviet censorship on par with the Nazi filtering, Operation Barbarossa most likely would have gone ahead and given us the truly ugly Eastern Front, but the Mediterranean and West Europe get fuzzy.

The US would have seen that Hitler was not going to be satisfied with the appeasment measures Chamberlin handed out, and may have joined the British Expiditionary Force to France in 1940. That brings up the possibility of France never actually falling, and then the war as we know it just goes out the window from there.

Zeld2.0

I think in the long run it would've evened out to be nothing.

While there is much fact-checking ability in the internet, the internet also spreads something's popularity. That would really cancel things out.

And it is key to note that if the German government is keeping things away from the rest of the world, the rest of the world won't have many if any facts to present other than the image given.

oktjabr

I wonder how would this internet fact-checking actually work. I mean, someone has to put that information to the internet. And:

1) World was full of antisemitic rhetoric and many, many respectable scientists took racial theories seriously. Not only in Germany but in the west, too.

2) Would German people, struggling in the economical depression, have believed if the western sources refuted the Dolchstosslegende?

Typical to the contrafactual thinking - especially in so anachronistic scenarios as this is - we can never really know. I mean, how far to the past do we have to go? When was the internet invented in this parallel world? Can we imagine it strenghtening the Weimar Republic from the beginning?

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Tophat665

I think the whole thing would have been shut down from the outset. Godwin's law, and all.

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maypo

It could have made a dramatic difference. Most nations had no idea about the genocide until the close of the war. It may have mobilized opposition worldwide. I think the point being made however is that the mass media is unable to offer real information any longer without risk to their ratings and accusations of bias. CNN=FOX, I can almost no longer tell them apart. The internet does offer the possibility of discussion but many times partisan diatribe is used to squelch actual information, balance many times skews reality or as Steven Colbert said on the daily show (about the reading of the names of the dead soldiers in Iraq): "How can this information be unbiased when the facts themselves are biased against President Bush."

There were many american apologists for the Nazis including Lindbergh and Phillip Johnson, they would be logging on, telling you what a super guy Hitler was and how he only invaded Poland because of their links to terrorists.

roachboy

it is easy to forget that fascism last time around had alot of support--it made sense to some folk, being a radical nationalist ideology that united them in a historical mission directed at an enemy that was both inside and outside, powerful and powerless--a mission personified in the person of the Leader, who spoke almost entirely in the discourse of Will. it reassured people in unstable times. it was most effective in its use of the dominant media of the time.

you would not have had people stepping outside that frame of reference any more than you do now, had the internet existed then, i suspect.

but in general, counterfactual histories are futile.

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meepa

I don't think you're taking into account that the consolidation of power for the Nazis in Germany was a lot more than just a propaganda-fest. There is a HUGE list of reasons why the Weimar Republic went down and the Nazis came to power including (without further elaboration because nobody wants to read an essay):

Inflation/ paying for the costs of war (WWI) & demobilization

French occupation of important industrial areas due to German failure to pay reparations

High unemployment

Polarization of the potlical "left", ie between the communists and social democrats (I can't stress this enough because it was essentially this that opened the door for right-wing, authoritarian groups to gain a lot of ground)

I just wanted to pick some of the biggest issues that came to mind, but it was these thing among others that really made the Weimar Republic prone to collapse. There were just too many problems, all contributing to what Peukert termed the "Crisis of Classical Modernity".*** The average Hans in Germany was getting sick and tired of the chaotic times of the Republic and without a unified Left, there was a general longing for "the good old days" (ie Bismark) of an authoritarian goverment that could just get shit done.

Now the shift to the right was not immedietly, "Hey, lets all join a Jew-hating party that wants to take over the world!" It is crucial to recognize that 1) anti-semitism was strong in Germany (as in the rest of Europe) prior to Nazism... hating Jews was NOTHING new. The only new thing Nazis brought to it (and this was much later in WWII) was the mass executions of them.

Germany was on the path to a Rightist totalitarian regime anyway even before the Nazis were a serious contending party. The last presidents of the Republic were very right-wing figures who didn't really have faith in the system anymore anyway: this really shows that popular opinion for Weimar was failing.

The fact that the Nazi part was the ultimate inheritor (or thief) of German politics lies in a complicated story of both the evolution of the Nazi party (from something actually being sorta socialist to not at all) and the super charisma of Hitler and his propaganda machine.

So I guess all of this was hastily slapped-together background for me to say that even if the internet was there, it may not have changed much because the Nazi party was giving Germans results (ie revitalizing the economy, etc). They wouldn't give too big a shit about all the anti-semitism concerns because a lot of them already didn't like Jews anyway (hooray for scape goats). Maybe some people would have been worried if they had known the revitalization of the economy was unsustainable and could only be paid off by a looting-war of Europe (hence WWII), but that would have probably been interpereted as Leftis conspiracy theories as everyone was happy as hell to be choking down sausage and having some national pride again.

***For more on this subject, check out "The Weimar Republic" by Detlev Peukert. It is probably the definitive source on Weimar and the myriad of reasons why it fell (be warned, it doesn't focus on Nazism very much, only how they could weasel their way in)

seep

^largely correct

Honestly, the only place I see the internet making a big difference is that the government would have had a hard time getting away with mass executions. Pretty much nobody liked the Jews anyway. Perhaps they would've deported dissidents and Jews instead.

fuzyfuzer

this has been said a few times already and quite well i might add, but the German people just seemed to want the good sucessful times back. really good evidence of this is that in Berlin there was not a wall incasing west belin for many years. so you had people that thought communisms was going to be everything that it was cracked up to be. it wasn't until people saw how their neighbors under democracy were doing better (there are many reasons for this that i am not going to go into but i don't mean to attack anyones stand). once the people wanted change it was put down with force that i beleive was the day that many east berliners at least lost faith in that economic system so it became necisary to containt those that were a "bad" influence on your population. it's kind of sad the way things went but it is history and we have to know it.

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theusername

Remember that the Nazis slaughtered a lot more people than just Jews, 6 million Jews, 14 million others. They would not have been deported, Hitler tried to deport them but every single nation including the United States refused to take them. Had the internet been controlled by the Nazis then it would be no different than it was. Had the internet been uncensored it may have made Hitlers intentions clearer and caused Germans to oppose the Nazi regime or caused other nations to act earlier.

However, saying all this, the internet exists today. Go to Sudan. Genocide's taking place right there as we speak.

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summerkc

I am just amazed that with all the information we have today and quick access to it that people are so uninformed and have a limited "right now" view on things.

The war in Iraq is a create example. In a bubble, the war in Iraq does look like a quagmire and a disater or a mistake. Take it in context with other previous wars and it is no differnt, if not amazingly better.

In WWII we had a major presence in Germany for at least 8 years after Hitler fell and took many years to rebuild the country. The same thing for Japan. Everyone said that democracy would be impossible in these countries and there were insurgients that kept fighting well after the war was over. The same is true for Iraq.

First off, the take over of the country took 3 weeks and with minimal causulties to our forces. One year later, there was a interim government in place, and 6 months after that there will be elections.

It is horrible that people are getting killed, but no more than get killed every day in California due to gang violence. These reconstructions do not take place over night, just like they didn't in WWII, which almost everyone considers a major success even though we lost tens of thousands of American troops.

oktjabr

I'm not an expert on this matter but as far as I know, the German Wehrwolf was a sad excuse of an insurgency when compared to situation in Iraq.

And just (a bit) out of context, does "uninformed" also include people who think that war in Iraq was a failure?

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summerkc

Unfortunately yes, but it is not their fault. We see only a small snapshot on Iraq in the news every night. We only see the bombings and the death count.

This is sortof like seeing how many people were murdered in L.A. every night due to gang violence and saying that California is a quagmire and we should have never made it a state, etc. Sure gangs are a problem, but for the most part California is a great state that functions fine. There is just a few bad neighborhoods. The same is true for Iraq.

If the partisan media and left didn't spin the war so much and showed everything that is actually being done, the public would have a much better view on Iraq.

Ustwo

If the internet had exsisted in 1937 we would have seen a lot of freeky Nazi porn.

Thats my prediction.

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oktjabr

I wonder why I have a feeling that your opinion on this might be somewhat partisan, too.

I know that arguing about this is an endless bog, but c'mon... where does your information about life in Iraq being just one happy party with rainbow colours everywhere come from? Am I right if I say from partisan commentators? Or have you been to Iraq lately? Have you been to Russia lately so you can say that the old communism ain't pop there?

The truth is, there is no such thing as objective flow of information unless you go to Iraq and see things yourself. Same more or less applies to our scenario of the Third Reich Broadband.

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Glorp

To a certain extent, there was a type of internet in Germany, and Europe, during the years leading up to the Third Reich. Between salons, cafes, cabaret, and the like, the intelligentsia (which is what I am assuming most technosavvy people would consider themselves) had ample opportunity to communicate in real time. Adding to that the fact that even your average European city had something like ten daily newspapers serving one population or another, and you've got a pretty decent flow of ideas. The only thing was, as the Nazi party consolidated its power, people were forced to choose a membership in one of three camps; Pro-Nazi, Appeaser, or Running for Dear Life. Would the existence of an Internet have mattered at that point? Dunno. Topic for converation.

whocarz

One must remember that the German people had been through 6 years of war, had millions killed, suffered through a massive bombing campaign, etc. Their will to fight had pretty much been crushed by the end of the war. On the other hand, the invasion and conquest of Iraq took under a month, civilian casualties weren't numerous enough to quell any opposition, but rather was enough to rouse the spirit of resistance. The will of the people had not yet been broken when the Iraqi government collapsed. That is the reason why you see such a large resistance movement. It may well take decades to break their will if it continues at this rate, but this is the price one must pay when you wage a "nice" war.

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oktjabr

And also one of the reasons was the common loss of belief in national socialism as it heavily relied on the personal cult of the Führer and the party apparatus. Doesn't seem to be the case in Iraq, though I'd still hesitate to compare these totally different wars with each other. Too much anachronism.

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Supersonic

I LOL'ed

tarvuz

I am happy with this thread getting such interesting replies. I would love to see lots of interesting What If?..... threads. Anyone else have one?

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