[net.politics.theory] Slippery slope nightmares once again

baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (07/27/85)

> > Hitler was not elected to power.  He received only 36.8 percent of the 
> > vote in the second ballot of the German presidential elections of 1932.
>
> That wasn't when he came to power.

True, but it *was* the closest he ever came to being personally elected.

> >                                                       In return for
> > putting the Nazis into coalition with the Center and Nationalist
> > parties, Hitler secured the Chancellorship for himself.  With the power
> > of that office, with effective control of the streets, and with the
> > burning of the Reichstag used as an excuse to assume emergency powers,
> > the Nazi's *still* failed to win a majority in the Reichstag the 
> > following year.  So they contrived a rigged session in which the
> > Reichstag effectively signed over its authority to Hitler.
> > 
> > It was supposed to look like democracy.  All good coups do.
> > 
> Majority isn't required in a parlimentary system.  The election that
> I was referring to was the 1933 parlimentary election in which the 
> National Socialists received 42% of the vote, and the Nationalists
> (coalition partners) received 6% of the vote.

Hitler had already been appointed chancellor before the 1933 election took
place.  State radio was used for Nazi propaganda in that campaign, and police 
were forbidden to interfere with the Nazi SA's suppression of opposition 
gatherings and newspapers.  For something that you characterize as "more 
democratic than *any* election ever held in this country", it sounds an 
awful lot like Ortega's election in Nicaragua to me.

						Baba