Unfortunately, people still fully buy that the Nazis were smart and evil. In reality, most of them were a bunch of dumb nerds cosplaying alt-history fantasies to prove they were “totally big strong men and should be treated as such” and that people just… let them. It’s actually quite similar! 🗃️
"Only our group knows what's REALLY going on! Burn down the corrupt world we know now!" is a classic mobilizing theme for crazed revolutions throughout history. You can't sell that and adapt to existing consensus at the same time. Gotta wreck most of it.
It's a problem, that to me, always stems from trying to equate Democracy vs. Communism vs. Fascism as a battle between 3 equal challengers, when it's really just this meme:
Democracy: Everyone votes for the person they think will deliver a better world. Communism: Trust the government will build a better world for everyone. Fascism: Based on a fairy tale we like, if we kill everyone else, the world will BE that fairy tale! Fascism, like Trump & RFK, is stupid.
Nazis made major military blunders, no doubt due to Hitler’s meddling and megalomania.
Invading the USSR while it had a totalitarian dictator of its own who would never capitulate until he had to was a blunder on its own long before the megalomaniac meddling became a factor.
The Nazis also did a horrendous job controlling the territories they occupied. Resistance was constant because you can’t actually occupy anywhere with just fear. Even the Mongols forged ties with local liaisons before moving onto the next city.
The people behind the Nazis were eugenicists who still control our society to this day. They are definitely geniuses. They definitely believing in killing their way to a superior race. They cloned me. They clone a lot of people.
My historian sister says this all the time-They were absolute creep weirdos.
They’re literally the guy who joins your D&D game with so much ham-fisted fan fiction about his “super awesome and totally unique” character who you just want to punch in the face. And yet somehow a lot of normal German people watched them re-write reality and just went “this is fine.”
So yeah, when you put it that way it sounds a lot like today! Except instead of saying “based on runes I can’t translate, we’re actually the cool special people from India,” we’re not even that creative.