Schedium

In the elections of May 20, 1928, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) led by Adolf Hitler received 2.6 percent of the vote, obtaining 12 seats in Germany's parliament. The NSDAP appeared to be nothing but a tiny fringe party with an extremist ideology and very little prospect of playing a major role in German politics. But only four years later, in the elections of 31 July, 1932, the NSDAP received a staggering 37.4 percent of the vote, becoming by far the largest party in parliament with 230 seats.   Hitler saluting stormtroopers at a parade in Weimar, 1930. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10541 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0 Who were the people who turned their back on the German Republic and voted for a party that campaigned on the promise of doing away with democracy altogether? Why did the NSDAP manage to do what other parties could not: build a broad coalition that included different segments of the upper, middle and w...

Several years ago I met an elderly British man in Hong Kong who had recently travelled to North Korea as a tourist. When I heard that, I became curious. It doesn't happen very often to bump into someone who has visited the secluded Kim dictatorship. To my surprise, he started to rant about how “biased” Western media were. I don't recall his exact words, but the gist of it was that North Korea was very clean, there was no graffiti, no crime, the buildings were modern, in short, the country was not at all how Western media always portrayed it.   I took these pictures during the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong   I was quite startled. But in retrospect, I shouldn't have been. Throughout the years, I came across a lot of people who voiced sympathy for authoritarian regimes. I grew up in Italy. Even though fascism was defeated militarily in 1943-1945, and it seemed (for a time) to be a taboo subject to better be avoided in public, there are still people ...

One of the paradoxes of democracy is that it creates freedoms which can be exploited by extremist groups to win enough votes to form a government and then destroy democracy itself from within. The most striking example of such a process is the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) in 1932-33. ©Anja Pietsch via Wikimedia Commons     On November 9, 1918, the German Emperor William II abdicated after the country's defeat in World War I. The Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the founding of a German Republic from the balcony of the parliament (Reichstag) building.¹ The German Republic is commonly known as the Weimar Republic, because the assembly that wrote its constitution met in the city of Weimar. However, its official name was "German Empire" (Deutsches Reich). As a matter of fact, Germany retained the same official name from 1871 up until 1945 despite the three political u...

The party which once claimed to be for small government and free markets has taken off the mask, laying bare its true intentions.  On January 17, Florida's Republican Governor and Trustees of the State Board of Administration (SBA) approved measures to "protect Florida’s investments from woke environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG), ensuring that all investment decisions focus solely on maximizing the highest rate of return" (my emphasis).  " House Chamber, Florida State Capitol " by  StevenM_61  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 . __________