The situation I am thinking of is like this: Suppose you get up in public and give a long speech denouncing some minority. If they want to, representatives of that minority should be allowed to tell their side of the story from the same platform without being molested or demeaned. If that's allowed, you can say whatever you like about them. Is that not good?

The German state failed completely and a warlord wannabe came to power. (Although it just occurred to me that you might not call the failed democracies that turn into dictatorships in Latin America "failed states", and you might not describe the transition as a "collapse". I don't know the correct term for such polities, but that's the kind of state Germany was.) A similar situation occurred in Russia, only an insane religious group took control there. (I know less about Russia, but my information comes from Kotkin's biography of Stalin, a monumental work of scholarship which describes the state's total failure in lurid detail. Russia is another country besides France where the aristocratic ideal failed completely and doomed the country to revolution. However, Russia's collapse was much more severe than Germany's. The latter's militarism at least formally grew as a continuation of the old order.)

The German warlord tried to invade Russia even though Russia wouldn't have invaded Germany any time soon, lost, and the nation was divided up among the victors. The victors then had a falling out between themselves and Germany was divided into two halves for over 40 years! Thanks to the failure of the state and the opportunist policies of the warlord, each of the victors got to indoctrinate Germans living in their territories with their pet ideologies, and a staggering 10% of the world population of Germans died during the war. (Not to mention territorial losses.)

And you say Germany didn't collapse? I'm sorry, I completely disagree with your interpretation of what occurred.

Meanwhile, England lost its empire after its fight with Germany, but the state didn't collapse at all. It even put someone like Winston Churchill who had definite warlord-like tendencies and might have become one in any other society in power during the war, removed him after the war, and then brought him back later when he campaigned separately as a peacetime leader. They might of course have done better in hindsight, but that is breathtaking success as a society as far as I'm concerned.

(You can of course trace the historical causes of Germany's collapse as far back as you like. Here are some relatively short descriptions that give an idea of the ground-level realities of the Weimar republic: http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086708&hilit=democracy#p1086708 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086725&hilit=democracy#p1086725 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086786&hilit=democracy#p1086786 Though none of these specifically address Hitler's takeover, you can probably tell that the situation was a close parallel to what you find in parts of Latin America.

I can't find similar short descriptions of what Germany was like prior to WWI, but here is Chesterton speaking his mind in his own amusing way: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11560 Reading between the lines, you can see how Germany's foreign policy managed to alienate all its neighbors at the time.)

1) S is empty for every society in the world, i.e. bigots are figments of our imagination?

2) Are you a deontologist or a consequentialist?