Hey, everybody, it's James Lindsay. You're listening to The New Discourses podcast, and we're continuing our long series on the Nazi experiment. And this makes volume 11, which if you're keeping up really means kind of 12, because there was an initial episode that I called the Nazi experiment before I started the series.

So it's a lot to summarize what that's all about, but we'll do a very brief job.

Basically, Germany found itself in a set of circumstances between World Wars 1 and 2, or really after World War I.

Those circumstances were deemed by sufficiently many in the population to try something new.

And so by looking at what the Nazi party was able to do, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, was able to do in the 1920s and going into the early 1930s,

and then, of course, acting in power through the 1930s,

beginning World War II and 1939 and losing it in 1945 in total catastrophe and defeat,

we can get some sense by stepping back and saying,

what was this experiment about?

And of course, the framing is relevant to today because we're seeing people, for example,

the alt-right or woke-right or whatever neo-reactionary character,

kind of a, on the patronage of the billionaire Peter Thiel,

this guy Curtis Jarvin the other day,

says, you know, look, Hitler is a bad guy,

but if you don't want to get a Hitler,

you're going to have to reckon with the fact

that he told a lot of truths that people resonated with. And if we aren't going to deal with those

truths, then, you know, we might end up with something like Hitler. And so this is a, this is an

inaccurate statement. He got dragged pretty hard for saying it, as he should,

because Hitler did not tell a lot of truths. He told a lot of lies. He said some true things

with bad interpretation. He told a lot of lies, blaming international jury and Jews for

control of everything, kind of being one of these.

...