> This catastrophe weighed as heavily on countries like Britain and France
> as it did on Germany, but they did not take the course Germany did. Why
> was this? Of course, they were among the victors, and Germany among the
> losers, but I think their greater experience with democratic traditions
> had something to do with it.
It's not so simple. Fascism wasn't a uniquely German phenomenon: there was Mussolini's Italy and imperial Japan -- semi-industrialized regions of the world-economy, who were far outclassed in the economic struggle with the Allies, and thus gambled on aggressive war. Adorno noted that Hitler's battlefield stupidity was a ruse of reason: only dim provincials could be stupid enough to think that mass terror could ever negate the Allies' quantitative superiority.
-- DRR