Social Engineering, Uber Alles

A reader sent a link to Mark Mazower’s Book, Hitler’s Empire:How the Nazis Ruled Europe. I haven’t read it, but the summary and editorial reviews at Amazon describe it as an account of how Hitler ruined himself by putting his political theories ahead of everything. Although it is little remembered today, the Fuhrer was a revolutionary in the sense of being out to upset the established order, put his racial and political theories into effect and generally, remake the world according to his own image.

Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn’t possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality. Leaving morality aside, the Holocaust made no economic sense at a time when Germany was desperately short of workers. When Victor Brack, one of the officials charged with carrying out the Final Solution, suggested that between 2 and 3 million Jews could be sterilized and put to work rather than killed, Hitler wasn’t interested. The German leader’s plans for the rest of the people in the East were even more absurd in economic terms, since they involved the majority of the local inhabitants, not just minorities. Under Nazi doctrine, Germanization was the overarching goal, which meant eliminating as many non-Germans as possible and finding and elevating local Germans or bringing in new German settlers. But after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, 90 percent of the inhabitants of German-occupied territory were Poles and only 6 percent ethnic Germans. And as the empire grew, the proportions of ethnic Germans became even smaller.

The book is apparently a story of ideology gone amuck. The Bush administration has been taken to task for the supposed folly of trying to “bring freedom to the middle east”. And maybe it was a foolish endeavor. But it’s fair to observe that many of the current proponents of Hope and Change hope to embark on even more far-ranging changes: to the economy, the environment, the way the world is governed, to the way we think. We’re only at the beginning of the process. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.