A story:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time there was a country which had been run by a small group of people who abrogated to themselves disproportionate power, excluding people from running the state they theoretically had a say in.

They regularly targeted religious minorities and socialists to unify their state, but in the first case produced the largest religious party in any state of their time and in the second the most massive socialist movement in any modern country. Adding to this further record of amazing, brilliant success these people inaugurate a general war on a continent where they keep their country entirely in the dark about what's really going on, flounder from battle to battle, spend most of the war scheming how to give each other the Dolchstoss and get away with it, and four years later everything's gone to Hell in a handbasket and now their unpatriotic traitors are in charge and they're relegated to the shadows, left with a power base less than a thirtieth the size of what they'd started out with.

So this smaller base sends an illegal immigrant to infiltrate a socialist-sounding movement, and he proves to have a silver tongue, taking over the movement, and tries and fails to overthrow the republic imitating a guy in a country south of him who'd done the same thing. He goes to trial, and once again the new system utterly fails to punish those dedicated to its own destruction. This ex-soldier traitor is given a propaganda boost, a slap on the wrist, writes memoirs blaming everybody for his failures but himself, and advocating repeating what failed the first time, but without any restraint for pure advantage. He gets out of prison with his party in shambles and everything's gone to Hell.

So this guy ultimately benefits from the bottom falling out of the new system a second time running, he starts running and gaining a greater base of support. How does he do this? Times are horrible, so he'll give jobs. His country is weak, so he'll make it stronger. Politics consists of gun fights between the Bloods and the Crips? He'll bring an artillery battery to a gunfight. So he goes from 2.7% of the vote to 18%, and then to over 40%, all with willing collaborators. He then sweet-talks the nobility and the generals into approving of him, too, and takes power in a pattern that is the most democratic that his country has ever seen to this point, the first man to ever do the whistle-stop tour, using the new media and new transportation of his day to create a massive media-saturation PR spin machine.

In the process, he paves the way for 12 years of Hell and the creation of the most ironic kind of failure his twisted worldview imagined. Because in the end, all it takes for the triumph of evil is not for good men to do nothing, but for evil men to be encouraged by those in authority to see their moral responsibility as being abdicated, and in a real-life version of GIFT to go and wreak utter, unrestrained horror.

This is the real lesson of Hitler. To paraphrase Carl Denham, it wasn't apathy slew the Republic, it was his willing collaborators who enjoyed three squares a day, an end to anarchy, disorder, and gangs in the streets engaging in running gun battles, and all the Jew-haters who viewed Jews as Communists, Communists as Jews, and both as a race with disproportionate power and influence, and who refused to admit any kind of responsibility for the defeat the German had had in 1918 who made Hitler. It was his millions of willing servants who slaughtered cities like Lidice and engaged in slaughters of 30,000 in Babi Yar and 300 in the Ardeatines Cave. It was his great gift to ensure Germans had steady food, water, shelter, and growing pride and prosperity that made him the most popular leader Germany had ever had, perhaps in fact the *first* popular leader it had across classes, depending on what Hindenburg was qualified as.

The real kicker is that Nazism offers a lesson that can't be historically exported. World War I and the Great Depression created an ethos of collectivized slaughter by the carload lot and an attitude that democracy was dead and capitalism with it that no longer exist in today's post-Soviet world. We can no longer capture the spirit of the 1920s and 1930s in this regard, we have instead today's issues of climate change progressively creating impending catastrophes on a global scale and the inability of elites in the rich and the poor countries to agree on unified solutions, the issues of neo-colonialism in the Third World retarding its political strength in its own right, the rise of new fanaticisms that are stateless and as such present a much more dangerous quandary for democracies, not much of one at all for dictatorships, and we have the ongoing credit crunch caused by states refusing to tax appropriately to the systems they have and being incapable of making hard decisions.



The issues of our time do not have the kind of singular charismatic focuses that were prevalent in the 1930s/40s. The world is a much bigger place than it used to be, it's back to being a single interconnected bloc, and the major crises are economic and environmental ones. Subjective, in other words, not visibly parading massive Freudian testaments to.....political potency. Let's leave it at that. These are problems requiring long-term solutions that transcend previous gaps, the kind that invariably only see too little and too late of a solution, if a solution appears at all. Focusing on the horrors of a long-vanished time whose spirit is long-dead does not provide the answers we need.

The 21st Century's problems need 21st Century solutions. The 1940s are dead and must at some point become as obscure in terms of references as things like the Battles of Varna and Pruth, or the Battle of Myriokephalon, or the Battle of Cajamarca, or the Chu-Han Contention. We need new rhetoric for a new era.

Comments

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

And they bear no resemblance to (hopefully) most modern American politicians, or LiveJournal commenteers.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Nope, the Fascists (and their Communist Bizarro counterparts) were far too organized and too willing to accept certain things that no modern politicians of any country would able to advocate for and retain either their jobs or their lives outside museum pieces like North Korea. For that matter, people do forget that there was a huge German Communist Party that rose as fast as the Nazis did, actually surpassed them in the last election held in the Republic, and only failed to stop him because of that meddling Stalin. Who did that for the inevitable truth that when two Leftists who disagree get in a room their disagreement takes precedence over the Right Winger in the corner loading his gun, switching it off safety, and aiming right for their foreheads.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The 1940s are dead and must at some point become as obscure in terms of references as things like the Battles of Varna and Pruth, or the Battle of Myriokephalon, or the Battle of Cajamarca, or the Chu-Han Contention. We need new rhetoric for a new era.

I hope this is not an indication that you'll stop referencing everything from the Peloponnesian War to Vasco do Gama in every post you make.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I don't recall having mentioned Vasco da Gama until this comment. I've been trying to change doing that as often as I do, so.....yeah.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

It was a joke. But it'd be appreciated, yeah.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

The real kicker is that Nazism offers a lesson that can't be historically exported.

I'm not so sure. Yes, the preceding Great War (aided by the well-timed Spanish Flu) is absent; but the financial collapse (that really has yet to happen) might just rival the Weimar money problem under the Versailles reparations. If that happens, all bets are off. Greek especially is looking mighty familiar right now. . . .

Bottom line, people need to pick up their Keynes and realize he called Hitler better than Nostradamus ever did. Then we need to scrap every vestige Nobel Prize in Economics Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel-awarded economists have been peddling, since that crap has gotten us in this hot water originally. Banks should never decide which theories people should embrace before they draft bank policy!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Er, I'm not so sure that it can do that nowadays due primarily to one factor the USA has going for it that Weimar Germany did not: if the USA goes, so does China, the EU, and everything else. They'll keep the USA afloat if nothing else does. However Hitler did not build an enduring basis for his own rapid economic process, because he geared it quite intentionally to spark a great war. The problem with that is this only works if you're able to actually beat your enemies in the war, and that doesn't necessarily always end up being so.

Greece's issues now are more akin to well, the issues of 1920s and 1930s *Balkan* states where democracy proved extremely fragile when put to the touch, and appropriately Greece's 'democracy' is the aftermath of deposing another of its long history of tinpot regimes in the present era, so it's actually an appropriate analogy in that case. The USA has never had army enough or social discipline enough to produce fascism, its own authoritarianism is the Jim Crow variety and worked very differently. That the USA had problems with the Jim Crow system and its home-grown dictatorships is in fact the major reason I don't like using either fascism or Nazism in reference to the USA. We have our own native pogrommers, we have our own totalitarian systems. We don't need to reference long-dead men of the 1920s-40s to find it here, where it outlasted fascism by nearly a generation (it didn't die in Spain until the 1970s and lasted longer in South America, too).

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

. . . if the USA goes, so does China, the EU, and everything else.

Maybe, maybe not. If the entire system goes, there will be no one to bail. That's a possibility.

Hitler did not build an enduring basis for his own rapid economic process, because he geared it quite intentionally to spark a great war.

Yes, but he used tricks of the monetary trade (learned primarily from Lincoln's Greenbacks) very, very effectively, garnering him support in droves. If a US president (or, more likely, Greek official) uses these same tricks, the country will give him or her a big fat pass. Will atrocities follow? Hard to say. What I've heard about the modern Greek fascist party is not encouraging.

. . . the major reason I don't like using either fascism or Nazism in reference to the USA.

While I appreciate the nuance, avoiding the F-bomb entirely might be the same as not teaching children the meaning of curse words. They end up repeating them anyway, just not understanding them.

Perhaps you could instead occasionally recognize and call out the corporatists more than evident just about frickin' everywhere in US politics? They're just a click or several below the fascists on the authoritarian scale.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Yes, but this is not the Great Depression, where there was already one alternative: the Soviet Union, and the first Fascist state in existence *before* things go south. This'd be something with no real historical analogy and likely as such to produce a system we can only guess at.

2) He built his support by promises, he delivered on them after he got office. It was not so much financial tricks as trying and failing to build autarky with the intention, as the Hossbach Memorandum shows, of initiating a great European war the whole time. Munich in this regard actually was both a success and a failure as it forestalled his real goal while in practice making him much stronger than he would otherwise have been. And even when he did get into the war it was in the winter of 1941 that reality kicked in with a vengeance. Prior to that time, a much better man than Adolf Hitler would have been turned into an epic douchebag by having a Midas Touch with literally everything he tried (except 1934 which nobody talks about because it would require mentioning that Hitler could have actually been deterred and thus WWII really was unnecessary, but eh).

3) No, we should call out the one-party systems and the attempts to prevent genuine democracy here, which is more than just the corporatists.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

1) No, The SU was not the first "fascist" state. Authoritarian, yes; fascist, definitely not. It was the first communist state. The actual fascists (like Hitler) arose as a response against the communists (as did neo-classical economists, which likely had a more lasting impact).

The fascists were loved by US businessmen. The communists were not.

2) About Hitler:

The German people were in such desperate straits that they relinquished control of the country to a dictator. . . . But autocratic authority did give Adolf Hitler something the American Greenbackers could only dream about -— total control of the economy. He was able to test their theories, and he proved that they worked. Like for Lincoln, Hitler's choices were to either submit to total debt slavery or create his own fiat money; and like Lincoln, he chose the fiat solution. . . .

Within two years, the unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade . . . using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits.

(Ellen Hodgson Brown, Web of Debt, Third Millennium Press, 2008, p. 230, I emboldened.)

You shared an anti-greenback cartoon recently; sadly, the type was too small to read. It was ridiculed, yes, but this system works, and got Hitler the people's love (along with his growing gang of goons, yes). And greenbacking the Deutchmark got him the cash to do it.

3) If by "one party systems" you mean "two party systems," I agree. Otherwise, I have no idea what you might be talking about.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) You do realize that Mussolini rose to power in 1922, the same year that the Sovnarkom transformed into the USSR? That's what I'm referring to, along with the rise of the Austro-Fascists in Austria that predated the rise of the Nazis. Fascism as a European movement with a major state to export it existed well before Hitler's movement broke out on the German national stage.

2) I'd need broader context, as people like Richard Overy and Adam Tooze have also made studies of Nazi economics, and to nobody's surprise they've concluded it was a wretched system that required itself to sustain wars it could get into but not out of.

3) I mean Jim Crow and its bastard byblows. You know the whole Solid South where the then-Southern GOP was a polite joke just like the 'none of the above' option on Soviet ballots. You have heard of that whole segregation thing that existed from the 1860s/90s to the 1960s, right?

[dwer.livejournal.com]

how is this Barack Obama's fault again?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Um, when did I say that it was his fault? I noted that no US politicians are the real Nazis, so using the term at all is a gross distortion of what the word actually means here in the USA. Obama's actions or inaction have nothing to do with this. Romney, Bush, Reagan, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, the other Bush, and all the Presidents and Presidential candidates since FDR's time likewise fall into this.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

I totally need a sarcasm icon.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Emoticons tend to be helpful too. ;-) :c) >:-] :D

[dwer.livejournal.com]

:\

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

@/---

:-*

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not the the first time I mistook sarcasm on the Internet and it won't be the last.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Damn, I wish my husband were on LJ.

Great post, thank you. I've just had an hour's discussion over it in my livingroom. Don't agree with all of it but lots of good info.

I would say that there is much to remember and learn from things as you state them, and they are certainly exportable to present day. There is a reason why "Never Again" is more than a marketable catch-phrase Twitter hashtag that was researched with government grants. It has happened before, it happened then in times contemporary to people I've known and loved in my life, and it will happen again unless we continue to rationally talk about these century-old circumstances that allowed or violently persuaded Western civilized cultured people to turn on their neighbors when the government, er, asked them to. (Often at the point of a gun, often not.)

I say "Western, civilized, cultured people" because that's what I am and who I relate to most closely. I don't discount others' experiences or the horrors of any other historical or current events.

To take the era of the 20s/30s/40s and cut them out, whole, from the historical narrative simply because there was only one Hitler, only one World War I -- oh wait, and World War 2 -- oh wait, and the continual threat of World War 3 as raised by many different factions on several continents -- is imho saying that it didn't really matter and none of could possibly be replicated in part because the whole is completely improbable, again. (Right or wrong, that's what my reaction is to much of what you say.) Each era is unique, yes, and while it would possibly be more conducive to academic discussion to bring in examples as you did, that particular set of decades and subsequent analysis of a closed historical (vs current) political system is far more accessible to the common people from eye witness accounts and the use of media as never before -- newsreels, communication, interviews with people over decades.

TL;DR: Dismiss the era as irrelevant, or n'oublie jamais.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem is that these circumstances actually weren't just limited to Hitler then or later. Mussolini rose by subverting democracy in a different way: he bluffed the King he'd March on Rome and the old bastard folded it up and let him do it. Lenin also subverted a democracy, in his case the Russian Provisional Government, but did so by co-opting the Petrograd Soviet. Stalin accomplished the relatively more difficult and actually kind of impressive in a sordid, twisted way feat of going from most powerful individual in the USSR in 1922 to only center of power in the USSR by 1928. Meaning Stalin was already the most powerful man over the entire expanse of the Soviet Union when Mussolini was a fledgling dictator and Hitler a mastermind of a farcical putsch.

Of the three the guy with the concentration camps beat the guy with the concentration camps and the death camps, and so we're actually left with a bigger problem than simple apathy with regard to Hitler: Hitler really wasn't beaten by democracy or freedom or good people, he was beaten by the monstrously barbaric Soviet regime. How do you explain this in a simplistic 'freedom good, despotism bad' concept, especially since democracy had to pick one or the other despotism to back and hope that the winner broke itself in the process?

People always forget that there was only one Hitler......in an era of Mussolinis, Francos, Stalins, Perons, Salazars, Petains, Titos, Hoxhas, and so on. The 1940s were a very dark time period, and we're fortunate not to face the same issues people did then.

But then again people seem to want to have the 1940s be Groundhog Day and be Bill Murray for some reason instead of addressing the all-too-real problems that actually exist.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

But then again people seem to want to have the 1940s be Groundhog Day and be Bill Murray for some reason instead of addressing the all-too-real problems that actually exist.

But here's my problem: seeing some similarities in behavior/governing/candidates/laws/enforcement, and bringing up in teeny-weeny little whispered gets the great big Donald Southerland finger of WHAT THE NAZIS? THIS IS NOTHING LIKE HITLER! Godwin's Law invocation for the effective purposes of shutting down the argument/conversation. It completely negates anything that may be relevant to all-too-real problems of today.

Example, if I may:

a country which had been run by a small group of people who abrogated to themselves disproportionate power, excluding people from running the state they theoretically had a say in

...

Times are horrible, so he'll give jobs. ...using the new media and new transportation of his day to create a massive media-saturation PR spin machine.

....

evil men to be encouraged by those in authority to see their moral responsibility as being abdicated, and in a real-life version of GIFT to go and wreak utter, unrestrained horror.

Sounds familiar, in a very real sense. No, I'm not comparing America to early 20th Century Germany. Or our government to the Nazis. But saying that there are similarities between what happened or what is encouraged or how lies are used to manipulate the electorate (all sides) can very easily get me branded with a great big huge scarlet C for a conspiracy nutcase and people shut their ears and their mouths. Instead of encouraging discussion as to why these things are not bad in and of themselves and I shouldn't necessarily be taken out and shot because I'm some bitter clinger Randian goofball who owns guns.

(Don't think I don't know there are people out there who would sooner see me dead because of my personal beliefs. I don't hold the same view of people I don't agree with. But many of these people, whom I have come up against on the political stage in the past, would very easily be persuaded that their moral responsibility is being abdicated and commit acts of horror in response. For my own good because I'm so dumb.)

My point is, there are lessons to be learned and we can't learn them if we pass them off as not recent enough. People and human nature are not that fungible, not in such a short term.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes and my point is that there are lessons....that have no degree of applicability to the United States because the USA is not the Weimar Republic and the 21st Century has no comparable issues to those of the 1940s where the Great Powers are concerned. Lessons being there does not mean that they are relevant to issues we face now.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Then why bother learning from history if nothing is applicable to today because it's a different time and circumstance?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, because the only reason we learn things is because they're 'applicable' in the sense that we can accuse people we don't like of turning people's skin into lampshades and ripping gold teeth out of their mouths.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

that have no degree of applicability to the United States

That phrase itself is too absolute to be taken at all seriously. Each situation differs from another by, as you point out, degrees of applicability, meaning the comparisons are not binary in any way. One can, therefore, assign importance to each and every data point, weigh that importance with numerical assignment, and determine, again, the degree of applicability/similarity between the two examples.

What should be argued and discussed is not the outright dismissal of any similarity, but the relevance of individual data points and how they should be weighted.

Binary declarations = Fiat declarations = Fingers in ears chanting lalalalala = as appropriate to any argument as Godwin's Law.