> 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.
But again, I don't think one can lump the Axis countries together without noting important differences -- to say nothing of lumping Nazi Germany together with the U.S. [!]. If Italy and Japan could be called "semi-industrialized" (and my very inadequate understanding is that Japan was rather more industrialized than Italy at that time), Germany certainly wasn't. No doubt the fact that Japan was critically dependent on imports of basic resources, especially oil, was one of the most important reasons it was drawn into the alliance, but that is not the complete explanation for its actions; its extreme brutality in China and other Asian nations was not necessary just to secure resources, but seems to have something to do with its traditional contempt for what it considered "inferior" Asian peoples.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand the reference to Adorno. I assume that "ruse of reason" is Hegel's "List der Vernunft," which I understand, but who are the "dim provincials" referred to? I'm by no means a military expert either, but I have always thought that Hitler's battlefield stupidity was due to the fact that he was just a terrible military strategist, but he realized that to keep his regime together he had to command the military himself, and on the whole the military people felt bound by their oath to him to obey him to the bitter end (except of course for the ones who tried but failed to blow him up).
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche