Under National Socialism, the state plundered and killed other national groups and races and use their resources to provide Germans with an unsparing… - L.K. Samuels

Yet it was the majority-led Girondins who had spearheaded the revolution and challenged the establishment. They accomplished far more than did the Montagnards. After toppling the king, the Girondins rushed into an abolitionist spree fueled by liberty, dissolving the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege, the system of church tithes, dues owed to local landlords, and personal servitude. The radical liberals also released the peasants from the seigneurial (lord) dues, which helped tenant farmers buy their own private farmland. Next, they turned their abolitionist gun-sights on the guild system that blocked entry to markets, as well as ‘tax farming,’ where private individuals would be licensed to collect taxes for the state while taking a large share for themselves.

After the Confederate States of America lost the Civil War in 1865, it was the Democratic Party which took center stage in opposing any civil rights protections for blacks. They opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which the Republican Congress passed, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. The law was simple and pertinent; it was ‘designed to provide blacks with the right to own private property, sign contracts, sue and serve as witnesses in a legal proceeding.’

Marxism had a lot to offer Hitler. Largely saddled with an unmovable, single-mindedness, hardcore Marxism allowed proponents to see themselves as noble crusaders saving humankind. Here too, Hitler could identify with such closed-mindedness, political messianism, and authoritarian tactics that licensed him to see himself as the savior of the world. A lover of the power of politics, Hitler’s hidebound views pushed him into the unshaded world of white and black antipodes, a battleground where you were either with him or undoubtedly against him, leaving no luxury of neutrality. Such exacting standards of political absolutism likely blinded him to other alternatives, or at least to the possibility of subjective objectivity that would allow the people to freely display their own diversity of opinions.