At 02:00 AM 12/19/2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:
After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of the main reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the Germans for the aggressions that started the war. He managed to use these feelings of being treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the first war. Also they were very humiliated by the fact that France then occupied part of western Germany.
That was certainly one of the most overt reasons for the war. An equally plausible reason has it as an inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the state above the individual. These three ideas spewed forth from some of the most respected philosophers of the late 19th Century (e.g., Kant). An excellent book "Ominous Parallels," by Leonard Peikoff builds the case that the rise of Nazism was facilitated by the philosophical content of mainstream German culture, and that the basic anti-individualist, anti-reason orientations of this culture are also apparent in modern American culture (hence the "Ominous Parallels"). steve