BC & PR

[DEMOREP1 at aol.com]

SB wrote

I just read a very interesting little book (or booklet) which makes a 
plausible
case that the election of Hitler and Mussolini was due to the proportional
representation system then used in Germany and Italy (Hermens, F. A.,
_Democracy and Proportional Representation_, University of Chicago Press,
1940). I guess that they used a party-list method based on a plurality of the
votes, but I don't know for sure. This little book is causing me to have 
second
thoughts of the desirability of PR, or at least some systems of PR. 
---
D-  How many folks do not know political history on this list ???

Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922 in his infamous March on Rome with 
his Black-Shirt fascists.  He survived until 1945 -- caught by anti-fascist 
partisans in northern Italy and hung.

Hitler was APPOINTED prime minister of Germany in Jan. 1933 (by outsmarting 
the morons who thought they could control him).

The nazis failed to get a majority of the seats in the 1932 Germany 
Parliament elections.

After the Reichstag Fire in Feb 1933 Hitler got dictatorship powers in Mar. 
1933 ----- the infamous *Enabling Act* --- producing the 1933-1945 tyranny in 
Germany.

He (and his regime) survived until April/May 1945 when he took poison and 
blew out his evil brains with a pistol (at the cost of about 45 million dead 
in Europe in World War II).

See the early chapters in the book-

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (a reporter in 
Germany for many years)