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canastrophee t1_j29vdnq wrote

The answer is fascism! It's real easy to raise money when a) your citizenry and their families are punished for disobeying and b) you're targeting an established ethnic group for systematic extermination and can steal and/or sell off all of their accumulated wealth. See Japanese-Americans on the west coast circa WW2 for greater detail on the second point.

Fascism as a political ideology is inherently based in fear and hate. Economic fear is very easy to motivate into ethnic hate with a little application of job-stealing propoganda -- in fact, it's the popular choice for totalitarians everywhere, including Putin. Also, money isn't real, in the sense that money is an approximation we've all agreed to value. Germany still had mines, schools, factories, and a lot of hungry people willing to be soldiers in order to be sure their family could eat, alongside the true believers and opportunistic Nazis.

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