austerity and history, osborn's problem!

[ernestine arnold]

Merkel forgets Germany's history: 'Austerity not inflation gave us Hitler'



Merkel forgets Germany's history: 'Austerity not inflation gave us Hitler'
To follow up on my earlier post on the disastrous consequences of Germany's austerity policies for the eurozone countries, here are some lines from a letter to the editor in the Financial Times yesterday. It comes from Anthony Murray in Kingston-on-Thames.

Murray recommends that readers should study the record of Heinrich Bruning, a predecessor of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. They could discover 'the real reason for Germany's descent into Nazism.'

'Monetarist fetishists have helped to circulate a pernicious falsehood that the Weimar uber-inflation caused the rise of Hitler.'

'The wild inflation storm occured in 1924. The Weimar economy recovered from it.'

'The Nazis came to power only in 1933, as an immediate consequence of the deflationary spiral that resulted from what Mr Wolf [commentator Martin Wolf, in an earlier article] refers to aptly as the "catastrophic austerity" introduced by Bruning.'

'Greece is now sufffering from policies of similarly "catastrophic austerity." Pray to Mario Draghi and Christine Lagarde that this time there is a better outcome than the eurozone governments deserve.'

What occurs to me after that last line, though Murray does not mention it, is that the three top people now forcing this catastrophic austerity on the eurozone are Angela Merkel from Germany, with its history of national socialism, ECB president Mario Draghi from Italy, with its history of fascism, and IMF chief Christine Lagarde from France, with its history of collaboration with Nazism.

But, God help us, they've all forgotten their own history.