July 25, 2023

The term “technocracy” is nothing new to our political lexicon. It’s been around for decades and is commonly associated with totalitarian leftist regimes who appoint technical elitist “experts” to manage specialized sectors of their regime’s military, economy, and other civil sectors. A technocracy’s effect is to nullify the will of the people.

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The first of such modern regimes was arguably the National Socialist German Workers Party (aka the Nazi Party). Minister of Armaments Albert Speer was among Hitler’s finest and most prized technocrats. In recent years, Speer’s role has been overshadowed by diabolical agents with more obvious blood on their hands, such as Adolf Eichman, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Goering, and others.

However, Speer was central to Hitler’s vision for Germany. He laid out grandiose architectural plans for the Third Reich’s capital and kept the bulk of the German armaments machine running, even as the lights dimmed around Hitler’s failed vision of a thousand-year reign of unopposed power. He was no less diabolical than his peers.

Since WWII, people have pondered and debated how it was possible for Germans, considered among the world’s most cultured and educated people, to fall in line with the Nazi agenda. After the war, Speer offered insights that are also warnings to Democrats’ technocratic aspirations.

Image: An event at Speer’s Zeppelintribune, showing how mass communication and imagery worked. CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

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When Germany surrendered, Speer was brought to the ancient German city of Nuremberg, where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity along with twenty-four others. After much deliberation between the tribunal, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at Spandau prison in Berlin. It was a slap on the wrist sentence compared to other regime members who stood trial and received death sentences.

When Speer’s trial neared its conclusion, his final testimony included information explaining how the Nazi regime effectively won the hearts and minds of the bulk of the German population after the nation’s economic and cultural decline following WWI. He also issued a stern warning to the victorious democratic nations that were already building large bureaucratic departments that were overseen by the proto-technocrats of their day.

(Keep in mind that America had a head start on this project: During the 1930s, Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the American federal government by adding nearly seventy megalithic bureaucracies to the Federal government, permanently transforming America’s governing system. This transformation began the process of convincing many well-meaning Americans that “the bigger the government, the better,” and conditioned Americans to embrace large bureaucratic agencies run by technocrats.)

Speer spoke the following:

Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people…

By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public-address systems, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where because of their high authority they were executed uncritically.