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Well, yeah of course morality aside. I actually think people were too easy on the germans of the time, my grandparents. We let them get away with their lies; that they didn’t believe, or profit, that they didn’t know, that they were threatened, that the war just happened to them, and that it was hard.
I think that’s more true of japan; they thought that without the resources of an empire, they could never fight and win a long war, therefore they could not threaten one, therefore they’d be relegated to the third rank of powers.
Hitler had a more dramatic, crazier theory: as more nations became industrialized and more populous, they would find it increasingly difficult to exchange their competing industrial goods for the limited food surplus from more agrarian countries, who themselves were industrializing and therefore there was less and less food surplus to trade. So he needed lebensraum to avoid the inevitable Malthusian starvation of his people. Not such a bad guy after all. Well, other people would still all starve. Anyway, it’s not that he loved autarky, it's that he thought all international trade would soon break down naturally. And then he planned to ‘keep a balance’ between the lebensraum-agrarian part (farms in the east)and the industrialized part(german factories) of his empire so that there would be no reduction of the agrarian food surplus and no starvation.
Yeah, I remember the Covid times too.
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Yeah he wouldn’t be such a “bad guy” were it not for the implications and designs that were baked into his desire for agricultural sustainability. This wasn’t some national policy of ecology he was seized by. It was part and parcel for his desire for German colonies via the war effort.
Anyone else can speculate endlessly about his ideas for the future state.
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