HITLER WAS INCOMPETENT AND LAZY--AND HIS NAZI GOVERNMENT WAS AN ABSOLUTE CLOWN SHOW OPINION

[underpants]

Sorry that's the headline from Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136

The below is an excerpt from HUMANS: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips.

So it's worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.

Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren't actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realise that this wasn't enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich later wrote in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, "In the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state."

His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.

Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn't get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn't do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.

He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea."

[Dan]

1. Unfortunately, fifty to sixty

Million people died as a result of his rule and he really didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction as we know them today.

Now, imagine what the clown in the White House will do with his circus, and he has weapons of mass destruction.

I sadly believe that the clown in chief would destroy the world rather than face penalties for the crimes he has committed and exposure of what he truly is and has done.

My thoughts.

[dlk]

6. Lazy or Not, He Still Got the Job Done

High levels of competence aren’t required to accomplish massive death and destruction.

[dlk]

21. Granted, it Wasn't the Mission Statement, However it Was Still the End Result

Given the scope of the atrocities, ultimately, I’m not sure that makes a difference. I understand the concern with how easily history can repeat itself, though. We are on the cusp, with a mad man in charge.

[BootinUp]

2. Amazing similarities to the Orange menace. Nt

[Iliyah]

3. I would say close to 100 million lost their lives because of this

lazy and incompetent sub-human.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. Hitler was also on meth throughout most of WWII.

So, you have an incompetent, lazy egomaniac who wants to exterminate non-Aryans and take over the world and he's a meth addict. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/10/14/high-hitler-nazi-leader-was-a-crystal-meth-addict-says-new-documentary/

So maybe the only significant difference between Hitler and Trump is that Trump doesn't use meth; he just snorts Adderal?

[dchill]

7. Slim difference.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

12. Very slim. Adderall is chemically related to meth,

and snorting it gives you an instant high. Hitler took pills. I guess that's the difference.

[dchill]

18. Trumpy definitely likes instant gratification...

Too bad only cruelty gratifies him.

[EarnestPutz]

5. I read Tom Phillips book recently and would recommend it. Human history....

....is so full of "f*ck ups" that they really do define us, more so than our less frequent successes.
I picked it up off the library shelf in the new acquisitions section, and looked it up in the "card catalog"
to see how the library handled the title. Two asterisks instead of just one. Mr. Dewey doesn't take any chances.

[underpants]

9. The title of the book gave me a laugh

Thanks for the recommendation

[EarnestPutz]

22. You're welcome. As one who frequents DU and feels that knows some of the regulars...

...a little bit, I think you will enjoy reading it. It gave me a perspective on how completely we can f**k things up and things still work out in the end, a perspective that gives me hope two years after we "elected" the Donald.

[Fiendish Thingy]

8. Despite the chaos and confusion, Hitler's leaders ran an effective despotic state

We know from records that the Holocaust was a highly organized, precisely executed operation (see the Wansee conference), and the ramping up of the German war and propaganda machines in the 30's would not have been possible without strict organization.

All of that happened after Hitler came to power- he didn't have those government and industrial foundations to fall back on like Trump does now- Hitler had an effective group of minions who ruthlessly carried out his madman's vision, even if it changed on a whim. As horrible as ICE is, The Gestapo makes ICE look like a weekend militia in Idaho...

[underpants]

11. Great points. I'd always seen Hitler as the front man

Who the actual orchestrators kept happy (with drugs), kept him in the dark, let him feel as if was running the show while doing their own thing their own way.

[hlthe2b]

10. As with Hitler, you could show this account to each & every one of Trump's supporters and they would

NEVER be self-aware enough to see the similarities clear as glass.

[world wide wally]

13. Proof that it is easier to tear something down than to build something

[tanyev]

14. Hmm, Hitler death April 1945, Trump born June 1946.

Reincarnation?

[ancianita]

15. Confusion in government is the hallmark of dictators. They want complete control by keeping everyone

out of control. More than that, the appearance of control. As in fake wrestling.

[Mc Mike]

16. Yeah, he sucked. Chewed the carpets, forced Rommel to fall on his sword.

Killed German Jewish Iron Cross awarded veterans in death camps.

Lazy, stupid, crazy, sucked as a tactician, surrounded by yes men. He didn't have blond hair and blue eyes.

A real Schiklgruber, second class.

But in the plus column he ate healthier than some wannabes I could mention.

[dalton99a]

17. Kick

He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.

Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get.

Hitler's personal failings didn't stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don't actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.

We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It's understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn't an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can't immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.

But history suggests that's a mistake, and it's one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

[dchill]

19. Perhaps "sapiens" is a misnomer.