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Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
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Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
I’m not sure and I’m not sure how much of an honest answer to the question simply because no academic is free to say anything nice about the nation and era that’s seen as demonic. It would be like asking a 16th century academic in Catholic ruled parts of Europe to describe John Calvin’s Geneva. Saying anything good about it, no matter how true or even obvious is, is going to get you n so much trouble that no one would dare.
The classic example of people saying nice things about Nazi Germany is the autobahn, right? I think historians still feel free to compliment that.
I suppose I think the consensus around Nazi Germany has moved in the direction that they did make some right calls and pick some low-hanging fruit, but also that a lot of their strengths were either inherited (e.g. the military system) or illusory and exaggerated (e.g. taking credit for the German economic revival). Nazism as a system wasn't uniquely brilliant.
The way TOS frames it is as something like a deal with the devil. You get efficiency, power, a rapid rise to power, social solidarity, etc., and all you have to do is be evil. That's not what was going on with Hitler's Germany.
My understanding is that at least some historians are arguing that the autobahn was started as a project before the Nazi takeover and they just completed an existing good idea.
But really, I think the thing that people secretly feel the Nazis did good with was the drip (as the kids call it), and the aesthetics. Triumph of the Will was one of the most cinematographically influential films ever made. Even when I was in school we watched that film in order to understand how compelling Nazi propaganda was, when I took a class on single-party states.
Star Wars took a lot of influence from Nazi aesthetics when depicting the empire (obviously -- stormtroopers!), and it's a meme in the Star Wars fandom that the empire's aesthetics are way better than the rebellion. I think in a lot of way that's people sublimating the psychological appeal of authoritarian aesthetics into a fictional format, where they can engage in memes that reference the appeal without actually calling for authoritarianism, which was obviously horrific to a great many people.
Communism also has great aesthetics, though limited by... the economic problems of socialism in the USSR. I think that's a feature of authoritarianism; control over cultural output means that culture can be oriented towards state goals, and all the psychological tricks of manipulation, persuasion, and appeal become essential to cement the regime's power. No one will ever create an election billboard more chilling than Mussolini. And look at this mosaic of Kim Il Sung: it shows nice composition, and the color is so cheerful and compelling. And the Great Hall of the People in Beijing just looks cool.
I think that kind of intense symbolism only becomes possible in religion, monarchy, and authoritarianism. Systems of power where the appeal is totalizing.
Just food for thought.
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Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.
It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.
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