The Pankian Metaphor was: Goodbye to USENET 2999

Those "values" were not unique to Germany. Nor to that period of history.

"Blame somebody else for your problems" can easily find ears amongst those who are ill-educated, poor, demoralised and feel persecuted. It's pointless to preach revolution to a full belly.

The perception of persecution was directly due to reparations. Reparations also meant that a country that could not feed itself at the end of WWI, could also not do so in the decade that followed.

Leaders of the Weimar Republic begged for relief from reparations because they could see that democracy wasn't sustainable when poverty was rife and industry was unable to grow to provide jobs because there were no profits on which to build. The object of reparations was ostensibly to force Germany into being an agrarian economy; for which it had even then, too large a population along with too many cities and town that'd developed over a century to support heavy industry.

The depth of reparations was also a reflection of the fear on the part of the victors. They understood that Germany had the cultural and industrial resilience to re-arm and to become a threat. But instead of dealing with the threat to encourage a government that would not have aggressive external policies, they instead tried to stop the kettle from boiling by stoking the coals of dissatisfaction.

It took WWII for most of the allies to realize that victors shouldn't keep beating up the vanquished if they wanted them to develop in a civilized way. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign "Laws do not persuade just because X against HTML mail they threaten." and postings Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.