a culture of corruption can be entrenched in any group of people and can be extremely resistant to change
That's certainly true. Also, I think decades of certain group cultural developments - like the worship of the military that was happening in Germany from 1870 onwards - were factors that led to the fascist mentality of the 1930s. (The story of the Hauptmann von Köpenick - the shoemaker/ex prisoner who impersonated an officer simply by putting on a uniform and got everyone to obey him blindly - amused everyone in pre WWI Germany, but the sinister flipside of that is of course the kind of mentality that responds to authority without ever questioning it.) And yet it was not inevitable. I mean, if you look at Germany and France in the late 1800s, the cult of the military and antisemitism are present in both to the same degree, and the Dreyfuss affair happened in France. But France remained a republic.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2018-12-07 03:22 pm (UTC)That's certainly true. Also, I think decades of certain group cultural developments - like the worship of the military that was happening in Germany from 1870 onwards - were factors that led to the fascist mentality of the 1930s. (The story of the Hauptmann von Köpenick - the shoemaker/ex prisoner who impersonated an officer simply by putting on a uniform and got everyone to obey him blindly - amused everyone in pre WWI Germany, but the sinister flipside of that is of course the kind of mentality that responds to authority without ever questioning it.) And yet it was not inevitable. I mean, if you look at Germany and France in the late 1800s, the cult of the military and antisemitism are present in both to the same degree, and the Dreyfuss affair happened in France. But France remained a republic.