well ?....would you have followed hitler ?

i touched upon this in the kenyan torture thread ...so i'll ask the question right out ...if hitler was born in wales or scotland or ireland and he managed to gain power in the 'british ' parliament in the late thirties would the english have gone down pretty much the same route as the germans did ...leading up to the second world war ...for americans ..hitler born in canada ...for australians ,hitler born in new zealand ...etc ....would be interested to hear your reasons for and against such a belief ...

No...

Never would've happened...

well ,that's debatable ....however it is a hypothetical question ..

well hypothetically, i don't think he would have had as many followers.

Well I think you are kind of asking two different questions: 1) If Hitler had been born in one of those countries and turned out the same way (which seems unlikely because as far as I know the reason he thought the way he did was because of things related to fighting for Germany in WWI) would he have been able to rise to power?
2) If he had already gained control of one of the countries would it have gone down the same way?

I think the answer is no to both. The reason Hitler was successful in Germany was because he was coat tailing on the sentiment which was derived from Germany losing WWI. The same sentiment wasn't really there to coat tail on in the other countries listed.

if your people were starving to death and someone gave you food and work would you? how Hitler went about saving his own people was very wrong but like most people with to much power it go's to your head he could have started out with the best intention to just pull the people from the brink its difficult to say what we would do in that situation without being in it...

The Milgram experiment showed it could happen anywhere, not just in 1930's/40's Germany

We can all say that of course we wouldn't because what he did was barbaric, but given the context of the state of Germany during that time, you didn't have much of a choice. It was safer to conform to it than to rebel, so I imagine a lot of people obeyed out of fear for their family, etc. Plus the economic situation wasn't great so it was a job. Not a nice job, but a job nonetheless.

leave adolf alone!!

This you can accept, but can you see the parallels between his appeal to 'the masses' and that of our Great Deceptor, Obama? I'm not by any means calling Obama a Hitler-figure, but there are circumstances that have aided his being elected....

i've thought about this from time to time over the years ...there were those in the british government and amongst the upper echelons of society who openly admired hitler ...to the point of appeasement ...the british even had their very own hitleresque character in oswald mosely ....i'm sorry to say that in my opinion ..britain would have followed hitler in much the same way as the germans did ....and as with the germans ...once you get into all the nasty aspects of hitlers rule , it's way too late to back out ...in which case ,the best option for many people is to keep your head down and hope the torturers don't notice you ...

There are doubts over the validity of the study though, so I wouldn't say it conclusively states that it could happen everywhere.

Really? I didn't know that, I thought it'd been repeated many times with similar results.

You've sparked my investigative gene, I'm going to research it a bit when I get back from lunch with friends in town.

Well, although it's replicable so reliable, validity not so much. The location that the original study took place in was a university where people are expected to conform and obey anyway. This is not representative of reality on the same level, so the study has low ecological validity. There's also a chance of demand characteristics occurring, particularly in the replicated studies as Milgram's experiment is quite a famous one. Therefore there is dubitable external validity also. The fact that they used self-selected participants suggests that these people were not typical of the normal population, so although the replications have made up for it, the original study is not a perfect explanation of normal behaviour.

On the whole it was a good albeit completely unethical study, but I wouldn't say it was 100% solid.