When in already devastated by the Great War Europe the Great Depression happened, europeans, seeing that things in USSR aren’t actually going so bad, started warming up to communists. Bourgeoisie smelled the smoke of future fires and started supporting the most reactionary, populist and anti-communists projects: fascism in Italy, francoism in Spain, national-socialism in Germany.
Communists, who didn’t have time to categorize different sorts of shit, started calling all these regimes fascist, simply because Italian fascism was chronologically first, plus it’s kind of awkward to call the enemy “national-socialist”, when you have your own international-socialism. Strictly speaking, nazis had a little less than nothing in common with the proponents of socialization and classless society, so it is more accurate to call them fascists.
“Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital… fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”
That’s why in most countries, especially those of the socialist bloc, “fascism” became synonymous with militarized nationalist chauvinism.
Italian Fascism historically assumed establishment of a “state corporation”, a merger between large private capital and the government body. When someone calls himself fascist, he means “I want the richest capitalists to unite and call themselves a state, while the police will protect them from me”. Nationalism is just an option for fascism. What is necessary is deep religiousness. Mussolini spent years trying to merge the state with the Holy See without success (the Pope didn’t join the state even though he sympathized it).
- Property mostly belongs to the state
- Merger of state and large capital
- Strong police
- Imperialist mentality
National-socialism on the other hand, while supported by the middle and large bourgeoisie, doesn't actually absorb it. Main source of income for Nazi Germany were interest-free loans. Although they were technically a sham, since no one planned to return them anyway, but still there was no direct ownership. By 1941 the largest portion of the state's budget came from exporting valuables from occupied countries, and still the budget was in deficit, which kind of shows that Hitler’s economy was a nonviable mutant, and would have lasted ten years at most. Even less without the looting. Military contracts play an important role in the economy, and the army - in society. Nationalism is obviously mandatory, Hitler’s ideologists even managed to fit christianity (Jews killed Christ) and islam (later on that) into their ideas of radical antisemitism.
- Mostly private property with occasional lending cons
- State and large capital are co-dependent but don’t merge
- Strong army
- Zoological racism
To put it simply, fascism and nazism are totally different sorts of shit. And one doesn’t lead to another. Brazil for example had its own pretty canonic fascism (so called Brazilian integralism) and no nazism or racism (Negro fashists were a common thing). And of course one of the best ways to send a neo-nazi into catatonic stupor is with a story of a racial Jewish yid Margherita Sarfatti - Mussolini’s mistress, muse and closest associate, who was called “Jewish mother of italian fascism” and without whom the italian fascism could quite possibly not have happened at all.
There are about as many fascisms as there are fascists. The first difference between them is national specificity. Every nation has its own mythology and claims towards their neighbors. There are fascists even in Israel, and (you’ve got to appreciate the irony) they also preach antisemitism (arabs are semites). The stylish attributes can differ quite a bit: compare cold germano-scandinavian heathens and their “Drang nach Osten” in Germany to spirited successors of glorious roman traditions with dreams of a Mediterranean Empire in Italy. Regular shifts due to political events are not uncommon, which shows that style isn’t important. Fascist Hitler hated Jews and fraternized with muslims, while fascist Breivik fraternized with Jews against muslim immigrants. It’s like Goring said: “I decide here who is a Jew and who isn’t”.
The second and a deeper difference comes from socio-historical specificity. Let’s look again at Italian fascism and German nazism. What they have in common is anti-communism, anti-liberalism, elitism, leaderism, militarism and a few other “isms”. What is noticeable is the difference in the definition of a nation. Italian fascists considered it to be all citizens of the Great Roman Empire, while in Germany the term had a strictly biological basis - proverbial “Aryan race”, blood, hair, eyes, etc.
There’s a common stereotype amongst uneducated (raised by Hollywood) masses that fascism was all about antisemitism, but then the founder of fascism Duce wasn’t a fascist at all, because he didn’t pick on Jews, at least before he became Fuhrer’s anal slave. Another famous fascist dictator Franko went even further and hid the Jews on his land, which accordingly makes him anti-fascist. And since we started talking about it, a pretty fascist dictator of Brazil Vargas participated in WWII on the side of allies. There are many fascisms. What’s common to all of them is this: they consider it normal and even right to oppress, prosecute and kill their political opponents, simply because they are opponents. Those who oppose the Truth should have no rights.
In short, all the fascists use the same old and peremptory excuse “it has to be done”, which sits higher than any moral, logical or legal norms, that’s why you cannot ever change a fascist’s mind. Laws need to be correctly re-written, morals - correctly re-educated. Still fascisms vary deeply by culture and time: second half of the previous century gave world jew-fascists, buddhist-fascists, even democrat-fascists. While the common image of antisemitic thug exists only in the media and only for morons, so that they kept thinking that fascism is something like a subculture, and couldn’t tell it by its deeds, reacting to the incepted stimuli as needed instead. Fascism is any justification as to why political opponents can be prosecuted bypassing the laws. The common ground for them is the division of people into the elite and cattle.
Fascism isn’t just something that happened in Italy or Germany, it’s any ideology that exculpates mad from hatred philistines, who can be sitting in an office and be apolitical or can be attending rallies, beating up minorities or be a minority themselves. The Dutch “neo-right” Pim Fortuyn, for example, was a liberal, a feminist, an atheist, a homosexual and a former marxist and considered all that to be traditional european values. And in order for democracy and tolerance to continue to prosper, he offered to burn in the fire pits of a new Auschwitz all muslim immigrants, because they can’t appreciate the values of european choice. Fascist ideology is always based on hypocrisy, where laws are indisputable for everybody, except true fascists. And if trotskyists openly said that the law is the tyranny of the elite, and stalinists tried to at least formally prosecute their opponents in accordance with common to everybody set of laws, and for that purpose created “Special troikas”, by fascist norms these troikas could have and should have murdered the opponents of the elite right in the streets. For their eliteness they can and even should break their own laws. They are high on power and violence, and that makes it easier to organize and use them, if something seriously threatens your profits.
Fascism and socialism
After the fall of the soviet bloc the forcing of “socialism = fascism” meme seemed to have been raised to an entirely new level, and to be honest fascism really is directly connected if not to communism specifically, then definitely to socialism.
The reason for the whole commie - sozi division was the lack of disposition in the working class towards radicalism, who preferred wage increase to rebellion. That led the Bernsteins and the Kautskys to conclude that capitalism hasn’t reached its Judgment Day yet, and shouldn’t be destroyed.
“There’s no point in socializing beggars”
Kautsky about Russia after the revolution
Sozi decided that capitalism needs to be pushed towards lesser wastefulness and better organization, in other words - to improve. Commies like Lenin declared them traitors, because with that goal in mind, a destroyer of capitalism becomes a bigger enemy than capitalist himself (i.e. class partner in capitalism improvement). The goal of social-democrats became elimination of inequality instead of elimination of private property, and their main supporters became people, who didn’t really want any radical changes: well-paid and highly-qualified workers and union bureaucrats. Their political course was named “class collaboration” and logically led to the support of native flag-wavers during WWI. Very soon in Russia, Germany, France sozi intellectuals found a hundred reasons why nationalism is more important than internationalism, and it was in this exact environment, where laborist Mosley and socialists Mussolini, Pilsudski and Otto Strasser began their path. Social-democrats generally campaigned against strikes in order to preserve a “whole”. Italian fascists and German national-socialists were different only in a sense, that they suggested changing the mind of anybody who disagreed by means of a bullet to the head. They also relied on the support of the “middle class”, only on its different pole - small business owners.
The mentality of the middle class forms the entire essence of fascism: like a peasant, who only cares about his farm, because that’s what’s feeding him, small proprietors and self-employed creatives care only about their own businesses. These people bust their asses every day in their small shops, relying only on themselves and luck. Naturally they start to develop a cult of personal willpower and intelligence, and only the 5% that hypothetically possess those are considered people by them. “Not everybody is smart and determined” - is the Truth they face every day. It’s impossible to make middle class understand, that it is not the uneducated spineless ne’er-do-well masses’ fault, that capitalism breeds them on purpose, because as soon as they start realizing it they leave their previous lives and become revolutionaries, like Che, Lenin, Trotsky and Marx, who all came from the middle class. They divide people on ubermenschen and untermenschen simply because their entire life experience screams about it, while biological racism is simply a way to fudge quasi-scientific causes to fit their theory, based on much broader cultural racism: only the select few are men, the rest are doomed.
In European history this obvious sentiment was already expressed before by calvinists during the Reformation: God already predetermined some men for success and heaven and some for living hell and hell in the afterlife. Nazi’s political program was based on the same logic: sorting people into grades, supremacy of the Truth in favor of the “right” men, ironclad protection by the law for small businesses, elimination of competition and methodical suppression of any opposition. The difference between the two was that the reformists were creating something new, while the nazis hindered any innovations, the first were squaishing obscurants and feudals, the second - scientists and communists, and, to boot, anybody else who didn’t fit the blonde Truth: mentally ill, Negros, non-trivial thinkers. If it was physically possible Nazis would have replaced women with men.
Both Nazis and Sozis agitated for conformism, and by late 20-s both parties turned into competing businesses offering anti-communist services. But then the Great depression happened and it pushed a lot of sozi’s electorate towards communists. As a result the system of parliamentary compromises became unstable, a real threat of mutiny emerged. Then the big daddies held council and decided that from now on the class collaboration will be implemented by force - and put the Nazis in charge.
In short, the ideology of tolerant conformists facilitated smooth but abrupt transition of scumbags to power, which leads to a simple conclusion: all wealthy conformists (especially the creatives) are not against fascism, instead they share its ideals in one way or the other. And the best example of this would be soviet communism. Despite the enforcement of unity, it wasn’t actually antagonistic and of course wasn’t it a copy of fascism for the same reasons as social-democracy. Bearing on bureaucracy and qualified workforce, renunciation of “export of the revolution”, elimination of inequality, but not in property, “peaceful coexistence” and later the “convergence of the two systems” achieved the same on planetary scale, as what social-democrats achieved on the scale of Weimar Germany - paved the way for fascists. Only this time they were a more modern kind.
Fascism and liberalism
“The dream of slaves: a market, where they could buy their own masters”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Contrary to popular opinion of those unfamiliar with sociology and politology fascism is still alive and prospering. Even the classic European fascism wasn’t completely eliminated, which you can learn about from so many Spaniards and Portuguese. Fascism is the ideology of the middle class, and will continue existing as long as the middle class itself. Italian fascism was the first in a long line of fascisms, and the last and most contemporary form is named, in the best traditions of double standards - neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a direct consequence of the post-war consumer society, when small proprietors became lost in the ocean of MNCs, while the working class of the golden billion were overfed into total political indifference. A radical difference of neoliberalism from fascism and social-democracy is that it isn’t an ideology of the middle class solidarity anymore, it is an ideology for the middle class, ideology of manipulating it. Just like in classic fascism, there's a self-proclaimed elite that can do anything it wants with surrounding cattle. To put it blunt, fascism achieved unconditional victory in the first world and has a lot of fun fucking modern day ubermenschen in the ass.
Classic fascism was a movement of small proprietors and therefore agitated for corporation, unification of conscience, religion, one true ideology and one-party state, for a charismatic leader, for a cult of strength, health, violence and asceticism. Neoliberalism on the other hand - is the ideology of the big daddies, who attempt to technocratically manipulate the middle class. And it is much easier to achieve with spineless braindead masses that still manage to maintain the division on regular jackoffs and “enlightened”. Such a curious dissonance - everybody around you is a retard, but not yourself.
A man isn’t being compelled to stick to a one true ideology anymore. He is completely stripped of any political preferences, it’s like he is sterilized, only not through the unification of content, but through a thousand of empty mutually exclusive abstractions, from which a man chooses himself what he likes more, and then sticks to them, without actually participating in anything. Occasionally he attends elections, where he casts a vote for some purely decorative character, created by the media and controlled by people in the shadows. In this type of society people don’t get oppressed for their convictions, simply because there are no people with convictions left, just like there are no people capable of independent thought. The new Absolute Truth is now that there are no absolute truths at all. A ban on supremacy of any single ideology is the same as a ban on all of them, even the classic liberal one, because neoliberalism is the ideology of absence of convictions - ideology of amorphic tolerance and indifference to everything around. Colour revolutions don’t require a unified ideology of the rebels, nor do they require a strong charismatic leader, on the contrary the mottos should be as vague as possible and the leaders - easily replaceable. Neoliberal media exists not for the purpose of indoctrinating with the “right” knowledge, but to form an opinion based on minimum amount of knowledge possible, so that after watching the news a man knows even less than before, but feels like he knows the real truth.
The state doesn’t compel anybody to do anything in the name of the nation anymore. It simply privatizes all “free” public goods, and the modern day slave suddenly finds himself earning monthly about as much as is necessary to sustain his life for a month. He and his children are constantly brainwashed on the subject of consumption standards, while the highest goal is declared to be egoism. The state doesn’t force people to think the right way, instead it explains, that this is what experts and majority (“according to the last survey…”) think, in order to convince you that everyone around is a piece of shit idiot, that nihilism and immorality are actually a norm . And just like that the with the help of advertisement, non-profits, subcultures, instagrams, media, opinion pluralism, tolerance young girls are pushed towards sucking dicks in front of webcams, while the relatively successful are taught to treat the poor as untermenschen and cattle. Or, to be more precise, as merchandise, since every person according to neoliberal doctrine is either a buyer or a seller of something. Children are a lucrative investment towards old age, and marriage is a long term lease agreement for genitals and some personal services. If the painting doesn't sell, to hell with the painter. Healthcare is a service, if you don’t have money, you know, just kill yourself. People are only those with money, and those without are untermenschen and should not exist. And since there’s already too many of them, we should work towards reducing their numbers anyway. So what if they die from hunger? Bums are not people, people can provide for themselves.
In short, neoliberalism is like in ancient times - slavery or prep table. Nobody even really tries to hide it anymore.
“Neoliberalism cares about market instead of progress, speculation instead of production, marketing success instead of quality of products, a fetish it represents instead of its consumer value… Those people who see value in the immediate purpose of things, like cloth’s purpose as clothing, are considered less than; and in contrast shirt’s tag “labels” its possessor in the same way as a luxury car serves to elevate its owner in the social hierarchy. Those who don’t possess material goods are devalued and excluded. Whose who possess are envied, courted and attract attention. “
As a general rule, neoliberal democratic countries are constantly in a state of war (US, Britain, France, Russia, India against Adivasi) for national interests. Neoliberals don’t specifically declare that the laws can be broken if national interest demand so, but still constantly make exceptions: not so long ago for communists, today for terrorists, tomorrow it will be some other “ists”, that don’t just include people in suicide vests yelling “Allahu Akbar”, but also everybody else who happened to lift their ass from the couch. You don’t even have to declare a Holy War or Race War anymore to excuse mass murder. A new perfect justification for genocide is “antiterrorist operation” . Because it's not the white people who slaughtered entire nations for profits, it’s the elusive terrorists who first blew up the twin towers.
Oh, what an awesome party ATO is! No laws exist during its execution, except for those of nature: you can kill in the tens of thousands like Russia in Chechnya or in the hundreds of thousands like the USA in Iraq. And nobody goes to prison or even gets a frown. You can torture captives in secret prisons, you can… well anything, as long as it is in the name of something. Clean hands for the engineers, clean conscience for the executors, fat profits for the principals. All it takes are occasional ritual sacrifices, to remind the first world electorate that it was well deserved. Nazis didn’t invent the genocide, they simply applied to their neighboors what before was considered a norm only towards the non-europeans. Hitler was an amateur compared to the British Empire.
Fascism is when a group of people take control of the state (it’s laws) in order to protect some at the expense of the other, which excludes the principle of equality before the law. Fascism is state-level discrimination based on “friend or foe” principle, sorting people on prime and choice. Folklore about racial untermenschen is necessary only in the initial stages of its development, and this is just one of millions of its possible variations. Fascists actually believe in these fairy tales, like religious fanatics, that’s why it’s impossible to pacify them or change their minds.
Neoliberalism serves the same purpose - it facilitates the consumerist lifestyle of the middle classes and the oligarchs at the expense of everybody else, with the only difference that fascist middle class acted on its own behalf, not as a oligarchs’ puppet. That’s why fascists enforced descrimination by means of dumb violence and retarded faith in the holy cow, while neoliberals use subtle manipulations, which of course doen’t cancel fanatic beliefs in tens and hundreds of holy cows. “Musilims are a threat to Western civilization”, “Immigrants took our jobs”, “democracy”, “invisible hand of the market”, etc. Neoliberals truly believe in them, without pausing to prove anything they indoctrinate the society with via mass media. One other dead giveaway of fascism is the accusation of the victim. Ragheads, wetbacks, hobbos always deserve what’s coming to them.
Fascists will arrest you, scream about it on every corner, torture you to death in the interrogation chamber, hang your mutilated corpse on the central squere, so that every citizen could see what happens to the enemies of the state. Maybe organize school trips there until it starts to stink.
With neoliberals you will either go somewhere and never come back, or they will make you look like evil personified to the public. The media will either ignore you, or will unmistakable prove that you are an extremist and a terrorist. During arrest you will barricade yourself inside your house and shoot yourself twice in the head with a blunt object. Post mortem you can turn out to be a neo-nazi and islamic fanatic, your relatives crushed by shame will start dying of strokes in bathtubs, and your former compadres in destabiliaing of the national climate will burn your house with all the remaining evidence and themselves.
Fascism relies on a single Holy Dogma, that everyone believes in, neoliberalism provides as many of them as there are different tastes, to instill descrimination on a level of personal values, which are perceived by a lemming as his personal preference instead of propaganda. Fascism in its core doesn't have anything to do with biological discrimination. If we open Taguieff’s “The Colour And Blood, A La Francaise racist doctrine” (catalog of racists ideologies), we will suddenly find neoliberal ideology to be an identical copy of what in the 19th century was called “evolutionary racism and social darwinism”. Nuff said.
Finally, there’s absolutely no difference between the economic policies of the Third Reich on the occupied territories and those of WTO in relation to its members: it can do anything, because a country that joins WTO acknowledges the supremacy of WTO’s laws over its own, in the same time WTO doesn’t obey the laws of the UN. The government turns into ventriloquist dummy and isn’t much different from a colonial administration: if the country suffers from famine, it’s government can’t reduce the export of food, “the invisible market hand” will regulate everything as necessary; it can’t nationalize anything in private hands, even if it is a water supply or a road, while it can and is encouraged to privatize everything. And since all the sectors of third world economics structurally depend on the development of related sectors of “senior partners”, a call to work harder today, in order to reach the level of developed countries tomorrow is about as sincere as a slogan “arbeit macht frei” on the gates of well-knows camp. And if you have something against this state of affairs, soon you will be visited by a guided european value of a certain caliber.
So compared to neoliberals fascists are amateurs, because their methods are as different as racketeering and a ponzi scheme, and they themselves as agent Smith’s Army and the Matrix, as ISIS and USA. Neoliberals yell on every corner about open market, but in reality the world trade is riddled with textbook protectionism and mercantilism for the benefit of first world ubermenschen.
Neoliberals strongly oppose government interference in the matters of business, but if they happen to control the government and there’s a crisis outside, then private banks suddenly happen to receive large sums with unrealistic numbers of zeroes straight from the budget. If somewhere on the planet there’s a country that doesn’t fully enjoy the benefits of effective management, then it’s time to democratize it, preferably fuck up its domestic market, so that the national capital flees in terror to the bank accounts somewhere in the US or EU. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Somalia, Rwanda, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Peru, USSR, Russia, Ukraine - the list goes on, and it's just the last 30 years.
“... the accused planned and executed inhuman wars against countries and nations, while breaking… rules and traditions of warfare, systematically using such methods as murder and cruel treatment, … looting of public and private property, unnecessary destruction of big and small cities and villages, and pointless from military perspective devstation… Murder and cruel treatment were carried out by different methods, including shooting, hanging… starving to death, exsessive overcrowding… systematic forced labor for those unable to perform it, inadequate sanitary conditions and medical treatment, beating and torture of all kinds… They established strong control over the economies of the occupied countries.”
From the prosecution statement of the Nuremberg trials
Fascism and anarchism
Contrary to what an average anarchist would tell you, classic anarchists came out of the middle class like classic fascists and shared the same views on corporatism, which contradict the very idea of anarchy.
With the transition to the neoliberal era they also became easily manipulated lemmings, and while neo-nazis are busy breaking skulls according to the will of the masters of atomized society, anarchists simply promote it through their propaganda. Today none of them see anything bad in marching side by side on the same political rallies, even though the founding fathers of both movements wouldn’t take a shit in the same forest with a liberal even if no one was watching, and if met face to face would kill each other to death.
Why fascism attracts
If you tell a modern day neo-nazi, that nazism killed a little more than fuckton of white folk across the world, many of whom were his fellow countrymen, you will only reenforce his belief that he made the right choice, because it means the nazi system successfully mauled millions of its enemies, and to a scumbag “might makes right”. A potentially shaved reader guided by this criterion assumes that Hitler cauterized with hot iron all of society’s bleeding sores (liberals, fags, bums, commies, minotities), united the nation and established order and prosperity in Germany.
Nazis chased out of the country most of the scientists, who later developed the atomic bomb in a more suitable for living place, while the Third Reich was busy dividing physics into “aryan” and “jewish”. The great scientist Goebbels explained that aryans descended from ancient greeks, bypassing the apes. What kind of scientific progress can you expect in such a society? None, stagnation and painful degradation under intent surveillance of gestapo. Well, what about created in Germany jets, sturmgewehr, infrared night sights, guided missiles and tons of other cool weapons? All the good stuff was created only for the purpose of war. Any sector outside the military was in deep shit. And things like the first TV broadcast, first programmable computer and first programming language don’t contradict that fact and are simply the direct result of Germany’s hundred and fifty year-long dominance in science.
The same happened with all the artists and philosophers. The great German philosophy and best cinema in the world ceased to exist even before the war. Freud joked that in the Middle Ages they would burn him at the stake, while now they are only burning his books, but he got out in time. German totalitarian art quickly turned into empty bombast crap, that didn’t teach anything, only praised and distorted. People with talent either fled, sold out or went underground to be exterminated one by one. Most of them were of course purebred Germans.
Hitler promised every citizen a “folk automobile” - Volkswagen, but for some reason there wasn't enough money for that. Where did they go? The economic innovations of the nazis were simple: crush the unions and establish monopolies. In the economic sense, the nazis became kind of like a collective pimp, who keeps his stable in obedience, sells them to oligarchs and makes sure johns don’t cross the line. The line of course is negotiated with the clients beforehand. As a result the workers ate bread, businessmen ate meat, and together they ate hamburgers. What’s most important, this system couldn’t progress at a reasonable speed and eventually even sustain itself without war and looting of its neighbors. “Take away and divide” is not a socialist idea, even today, it’s fascist. If communists attempted to “take away and unite” the property across the entire world, and USSR avoided wars and instead rebuilt and developed for free devastated and uninhabited territories, the Third Reich simply couldn’t exist without perpetual war - the elites didn’t want creative and qualitative development: the monopolists gained profits, the workers didn’t participate, the bureaucrats controlled, the crises re-occurred. Let’s say the Nazis won, conquered the USSR, and enslaved 500 million ubermenschen, they would simply suck out the resources like a giant parasite and spent tons of money on sonderkommandos to fight guerillas. The serious business would gradually become more and more dependent on slave labor (since you don’t have to pay them at all), which would inevitably change the proportion of “white” masters and “black” slaves-gastarbeiters. According to German’s own reports by the end of war nearly QUARTER of its workforce (7 million 600 thousand people) was involuntary labor. Nothing like this would be possible in any modern country, be it Germany, France, USA or Russia, for strictly economic reasons: there can’t be fewer slaves than masters just like there can’t be more parasites than those they suck from. It is obvious that in the end Germany would suffer the fate of Sparta, Rome, Babylon or at least Haiti: Germany itself together with all its parasites would simply be consumed and destroyed by those they brought in by force and pitted against themselves. The chances of survival of a title nation in that scenario are extremely low.
That same potentially shaved reader might be imagining himself a growing empire with stonecut legionnaires of Wehrmacht, awaited at home by fine blonde maidens with huge milk jugs, but the reality was completely different. Pre-war Germany was a repulsive mixture of patriotic histeria, intellectual degradation and weapons rattling, and nobody knew whom those weapons would fire at tomorrow. Everybody, except those sincerely devoted to nazism, smart and dumb, wealthy and poor - lived in fear and despair, with later added necessity to die in the trenches “for the race” (really for the monopoly-based economy to continue to work). The only real achievement of the regime was elimination of a million of its political rivals and tens of millions of accidental bystanders to boot. In the end that’s what it was created for in the first place.