I think I need to read these books on Nazi Germany
The book The Nazi Seizure of Power sounds like a fascinating read. From one of the customer reviews at Amazon:
…[The Nazis] were masterful at marketing at the local level. They tailored their messages to the specific audiences they were trying to attract. So if they were holding a meeting for workers in a particular location, they would bring in a specific speaker with a specific message. If it was businessmen, the message and speaker would be entirely different (and often entirely contradictory). They would tell whoever they were talking to whatever it was they thought they wanted to hear. And they measured success by the number of people at events and the number of paid party memberships. It is a fascinating lesson in manipulation and lying. You get to understand why 35% of Germans voted Nazi in the last free elections.
[The author] illuminates how daily life changed post 1933 for the average person. How the Nazi party stopped caring about what people wanted to hear and started becoming a top down organization. The nature of social discourse changed fundamentally. Instead of social activities being undertaken voluntarily and because they were fun and of interest to the participants, everything became to be centered on Nazism. As clubs and organizations were Nazified, most disappeared as people stopped having fun at them and began resenting being forced to do things. Block leaders were avoided, heil Hitlers were done unenthusiastically or not done at all, people stopped talking to each other as much and some even stopped going out altogether except when they had to attend party events. Resentment bloomed as capable people were replaced by incompetents and thieves merely because they were long time party members. Allen really gives you a good sense of how daily life became stifling post ’33.
I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.”
The Nazis rose to power in part because they were popular with the people; I’m not saying they weren’t. But they were not all that popular. For example, they never won a majority of the votes of the German people while elections were still free. One of the lessons of the Nazi rise to power it is important to learn is how a movement that is not supported by a majority of the population—such as, for example, leftism in the US—can nevertheless gain power in a democracy through democratic means, by conniving, lying about their intentions, ruthlessness, violence, threats and intimidation, cluelessness of their opponents about what they are up to, and a little bit of luck.
I’m no historian or expert on the Nazi takeover of Germany, but I’ve certainly read far more about it than the average person. And yet it is only recently that it has occurred to me that so much of what I’ve read focuses on the uniqueness of the German people: their unique racism, or rage, or obedience to authority, or attraction to demagogues, or militarism, or any number of other bad characteristics they exhibited. And no doubt there’s some truth in all of that; each people on earth is unique in its combination of national traits.
But at this point it seems to me it would be far more instructive to study the German people’s relative ordinariness, and the ruthless brilliance of the steps the Nazis took to quickly establish total control.
Another book[s] I haven’t read but probably should are the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer, journals he kept secretly that chronicled the Nazi regime’s rise and then its effect on everyday life in Germany. The ax fell very quickly, as this Amazon reader review notes:
The real shock was how fast the Nazis were able to move as soon as Hitler managed to obtain the Chancellorship! I had always had the sense of something of a linear progression of oppression from Hitler coming to power to the end of the war. It has been something of a shock to have my nose rubbed in the reality of how fast the Nazis got out of the gate, so to speak!
Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933. By 7 April Victor Klemperer was motivated to write, “The pressure I am under is greater than in the war, and for the first time in my life I feel political hatred for a group (as I did not during the war), a deadly hatred. In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.”…
By the 15th of May Victor writes, “The garden of a Communist in Heidenau is dug up, there is supposed to be a machine-gun in it. He denies it, nothing is found; to squeeze a confession out of him, he is beaten to death. The corpse brought to the hospital. Boot marks on the stomach, fist-sized holes in the back, cotton wool stuffed into them. Official post mortem result: Cause of death dysentery, which frequently causes premature “death spots.”
Before this, I didn’t realize at a gut level that things got this crazy before Hindenburg died in 1934! “Mein Kampf” is a blueprint for tyranny and this book is an eyewitness to that tyranny””in a civilized Western nation no less!
It goes without saying why I think this is important.
Here’s an excerpt from another comment at Amazon:
One thing I took note of was, at least from what Klemperer saw, perhaps half the German population sympathized with the Jews, if only in a quiet way. He writes about meeting ardent Nazis and people who try to make his life miserable because of his Jewishness, but more often he notes expressions of sympathy from strangers, shopkeepers slipping forbidden food into his basket, that sort of thing. He even wrote about a “Star Club,” a group of Aryans who went around giving friendly greetings to Jews on the street who wore the yellow star, just to show them not everyone hated them…The problem was, at least in Klemperer’s case, most of the people who sympathized with him did so in a very quiet, unproductive way: they were either too apathetic or too scared to take real action and provide serious, tangible aid. As some wise person once said, all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Still think that Germans were so very unusual?
Klemperer was protected from death because he was a Jew who had converted to Christianity (although his conversion didn’t seem to matter that much to the Nazis) and who was married to an Aryan woman (that, the Nazis cared about). Klemperer was a professor and had been a journalist when young, so he knew how to write. Here’s a sample of his style (also taken from one of the comments at Amazon):
For the moment I am still safe. But as someone on the gallows, who has the rope around his neck is safe. At any moment a new “law” can kick away the steps on which I’m standing and then I’m hanging.
From another comment at Amazon:
Klemperer reports that most Germans initially viewed Hitler as a loud-mouth provocateur but tolerated him as preferable to the threatening scourge of German Bolsheviks. Most expected Hitler to pass quickly from the scene. Their expectations were wrong, however, because he managed to seize power and began a campaign of eliminating his political challengers.
And here’s a comment that was written in August of 2006, years before the Obama administration:
I did come to the conclusion that part of the problem was: 1. the government spoke in slogans and lies and too many went along unthinkingly; 2. the media did not, and later was not able to, do their job; 3. the public was generally apathetic until it got to be too late.
Hmmm.
There is a sequel to Klemperer’s two Nazi-era journals, a third journal covering the postwar years of his life until 1959 (he died in 1960 at the age of 78). The title, The Lesser Evil, refers to his choice to return to his home city of Dresden (where he got his previously-confiscated house back and ended up a well-known and successful figure) and live under Communism—which he considered an evil, but a lesser one than capitalism.
Go figure.
This 2004 review of The Lesser Evil (by none other than Christopher Hitchens) takes up the puzzling question of why. Why did someone as astute, and contemptuous of Bolshevism and Communism and Marxism as Klemperer shows himself to be in his earlier diaries, not run for the hills (and the West?) after the war?:
A mixture of motives can be discerned. First, Klemperer feels that the most valiant anti-Nazis were the KPD and the Soviet Union. (That this conclusion involves some rewriting of history goes without saying.) And the VVN””the official association of victims of Nazi persecution, which he wishes to join””is quite clearly a Party front. But there is more to it than that. Deep down, and despite some memorable experiences to the contrary, he has ceased to trust the German people. In his mind, only a very strong regime will prevent the resurgence of anti-Jewish hatred that he regards as inevitable. This thought poisons even his better moments.
Well, perhaps. I don’t know; after all, I haven’t even read the book. But my gut tells me that, although that may have been part of it, it wasn’t the largest part. Klemperer had refused to leave Germany when Hitler came to power because he already considered himself old and ill, almost at death’s door, and already felt unable to start anew in a different country. So it’s hard to believe that he could have found the energy to do it after the war.
But even more importantly, throughout all the suffering of the 30s and WWII Klemperer continued to feel himself to be extremely German. What’s more, Dresden was his lifelong home, and it was located in East Germany rather than West. His house, position, and status had been taken away by the Nazis, but all were restored by the Communists.
You can’t go home again, not exactly. But Klemperer could try, and nearly succeeded. If the Nazis hadn’t been able to force him out of Dresden (until the very tail end of the war), how could he allow the Communists to do it?
I HIGHLY recommend The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
The Nazis did this in an age where communication was regionally limited. One could say one thing in Bremen and a totally contradictory thing in Munich and each would be old news before the contradiction could have time to be noticed.
One is tempted to say not so today with the presence of the 24/7 news cycle and the internet, but this only goes to underscore the importance of a free press. Obama has been successfully duplicating this tactic for 6 plus years because he has an obsequiously compliant press that plays down such contradictions. The only time the MSM sees daylight is when Obama opens his mouth to speak.
This illustrates the great importance of traditionalists and conservatives 1) developing their own readily visible presence in the media, and 2) not permitting liberal support by the MSM to go uncriticized.
Most of this post reminded me of “Liberal Fascism” by Goldberg.
I don’t pretend to understand the psyche of the average German before Hitler took power. The horrors of Communism including the Holodomor was in full swing at that very time very close to Germany. Many people probably voted for the Nazis because they thought the Nazis would protect them from the Communists.
The immense power of the epithet – – for all their divergent aspects and context, “Jewish” and “racist” are remarkably similar in their psychological provenance and effect.
BO and other American Leftists are not Nazis, true, because one is colored by race and nationality, the other by “class” and personal vanity (vaunted intellectual superiority).
In all other respects BO and American Leftists are not very different from Nazis.
Humans can tell the truth, seek objective fact, maintain a sense of fairness, proportion and integrity, recognize our common humanity and suffering, or we can be Nazis, BO, American Leftists, the Mafia or any number of variations on the bogus “insight” of the criminal mind, that “we” have discovered a more clever way. Ha, ha, ha.
Common denominator of the clever people: the thrill of treating other human beings like shit for fun and profit.
Common denominator of the boring people: the satisfaction of having a clean conscience.
Every caring person needs to learn more and understand more deeply the Nazis, to see what is going on in the world – – NOT the policies, the means and methods. Here is the truth: the policies are irrelevant.
But every caring person needs also to study Mao, learn about Mao, understand the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Mao is just as “great ” as Hitler, probably more so, mutatis mutandis.
The horror is how so many millions want to participate in the personal “greatness” of a Hitler, a Mao, a Mohammed; to have the thrill of inflicting yet more suffering on other human beings.
I am currently reading In the Garden of Beasts. It gives some interesting insight into the power struggles within the Nazis through the eyes of the American ambassador and his daughter.
Dennis, I think in some ways Germany was still a feudal-thinking country. Each person had his niche in society and didn’t question those in other niches.
Two indispensable books for understanding what happened in Germany: Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of growing up in that country between the wars, the (mistitled) “Defying Hitler,” and Hans Fallada’s classic novel Little Man, What Now?. I reviewed both and linked the reviews at my post Germany’s Descent in to Naziism.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/46723.html
Also, Erich Maria Remarque’s sadly-neglected novel The Road Back (which is sort of a sequel to his All Quiet on the Western Front) is important for understanding the psychological and social impact of the First World War. Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 article Who Would be a Nazi? speculate about what kinds of Americans would and would not go along with a Nazi-like movement. Above-linked post also links to the Dorothy Thompson article and to a review of the Remarque book.
As Americans we take it for granted that people speak out against the government when we disagree with it. We often do not realize how rare and precious this right is.
Most people in most places at most times during history do NOT contradict or challenge the ruling power but instead go along with it almost automatically, because very bad things can happen to you when you don’t.
I don’t believe the Nazis ever lied about their intentions. Here’s their party platform in the presidential election in 1932:
We demand the following:
–A union of all Germans to form a great Germany on the basis of the right to self-determination of peoples.
–Abolition of the Treaty of Versailles.
–Return lands lost in World War I and colonies to give German adequate living space.
–German blood as a requirement for German citizenship. No Jew can be a member of the nation.
–Non-citizens can live in Germany only as foreigners, subject to the law of aliens.
–Only citizens can vote or hold public office.
–The state insures that every citizen live decently and earn his livelihood. If it is impossible to provide food for the whole population, then aliens must be expelled.
–Guarantee for jobs and benefits for workers.
–No further immigration of non-Germans. Any non-German who entered Germany after August 2, 1914, shall leave immediately.
–A thorough reconstruction of our national system of education. The science of citizenship shall be taught from the beginning.
–That German citizens and owners must publish all newspapers in the German language.
–Eliminate the Marxist threat.
Excellent essay and comments.
Sadly, in the last decade, I have come to understand (by watching certain groups in America) how easily the good people of a “cultured nation” can fall victim to the minority of jackals in their midst.
Which is why we must never give the jackals the power that they crave, and why Obama’s government by executive order and ignoring or “rewriting” laws he doesn’t like must come to an end and never be taken up by another President.
The mannish boy, with the able assistance of the msm, has been lying like a dog under the porch. He constantly reverses course and his actions contradict what he said the day before. The fact that bho’s popularity numbers are not south of 20% indicates what happened in 1930s Germany can happen anywhere given the right economic conditions, a widespread public sense of their society unraveling, and a persuasive demagogue backed by an able propaganda apparatus.
“what happened in 1930s Germany can happen anywhere given the right economic conditions, a widespread public sense of their society unraveling, and a persuasive demagogue backed by an able propaganda apparatus.” parker
I would only add that the more ‘hostile the ground’ the more essential that it be ‘prepared’ properly. What happened in 1930’s Germany could not happen in 1930s America because the ground was not arable to cultivation of totalitarian ideologies. The Left of course has been preparing America’s ground since the 30’s. It may almost be time for the harvest.
I second David Foster’s recommendation of “Defying Hitler”
The Nazi’s were very effective in using propaganda once they came to power. The changed votes in a few weeks. Some excerpts from a recent paper on the subject.
“we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election.”
The title: Radio and the Rise of the Nazi in Prewar Germany
The full paper is here.
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00858992/document
The way extreme or totalitarian regimes push the people like a herd is pushed by predators, is via presenting an internal or external threat. Real or imagined, doesn’t truly matter. For the Germans pre Reich, it was the Communists. Then it was the Jews. Then it was the capitalists in Britain and America. Then it was back to the Communists again after they broke their alliance.
For the US, that external threat would be Islamic Jihad and the internal threat would be either Islamic Jihad or Mexicans or blacks or something else of that nature.
That’s why it takes a totalitarian regime to exploit these things for more power. Most normal governments aren’t thinking quite that far ahead, they just want to solve the temporary security problem, not use it to further increase the fear of the people so that they can produce a coup de tat.
Ann:
How about a few little details like:
–a widespread war of European conquest
–a plan to enslave the Slavic peoples
–the use of slave labor
–genocide of the Jews of all of Europe
–a wish that the German people and Germany be destroyed rather than surrender
You may argue that even the Nazis didn’t have all of that planned at the outset, and that it evolved over time. But promises broken, and deceptions, were the name of the game for Hitler from the start.
About his political ambitions:
About his territorial ambitions:
Hitler’s deceptiveness was purposeful and strategic.
David Foster and Randy:
I wrote about Defying Hitler here.
There was a zeitgeist of subjugating the individual to the group that permeated Germany going back centuries. How could people fall for that in the 20th century? What mechanisms rolled along on a daily basis to propagate tyranny?
The best book I ever read about how Nazism worked and why it existed in the first place is The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff. He synthesizes the big picture philosophy with the concrete horrors it spawned. Published in the early 80s, it offered a cautionary analysis of trends in America. I understand a new edition is coming out this year that will update the object lesson for the current perilous state of our republic. (Easily found at Amazon – don’t forget to click through the link at the top of the page!)
Ann:
Hitler was remarkably consistent, I believe. He wrote the original program for the Nazi party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist
Hitler was more honest than other Leftists, probably because he could be, because his (irrational and loathsome) category of thinking was based on the German people, not on economic “class,” the equally absurd and hate-filled category preferred by his fellow Leftists, the Marxists.
Hitler loved and adopted the means and methods of Marxism, and most of the “policies”; he just objected to what he described as the racial and non-Germanic aspect of Marxism.
Islam is the perfect ideological and idiotic system of Marxist and Nazi thought. It is the adoption of One Idea in the service of empowering the followers of a Jerk.
The paradox is the existential necessity of government.
Personally, the idea of government repels me. Like suffering, irrationality, hatred, poverty – – government is just a fact of life.
Personally, can I make my own voluntary associations to address life? I do not know the actual answer. I just know that I can far more than government thinks I can.
Islam, Marxism, National Socialism – – etc etc – – it’s all about government, coercion, monopoly. What answer does the American Left have, other than prison and punishment? What does the American Left ever propose other than prison and punishment?
What? Abortion and only abortion. Abortion is the only “freedom” they propose.
And so the monsters win and win.
On top of the non-avoidable suffering, more suffering, for the thrill of inflicting suffering. The lovely, euphoric, (empty) thrill of calling racist. Or pointing to a Jew.
Tonawanda:
Did you see my comment above about what Hitler lied about?
Neo, the Klemperer diaries are worth reading, if only for a glimpse of the last Central European bookish professors. He and his Jewish associates knew that people were being killed in local concentration camps, if not knowing the true details of the extermination camps. They were consistently surprised at how long the Nazis held on both before and during the war. Their countrymen seem to have gone along with a combination of patriotism/nationalism that Klemperer shared and a fear of the omnipresent police state. It’s the small injustices and battles that Klemperer has with the Nazis, right up to the end of the war that show this well. His survival depended on a constant careful resistance using the remnants of social respect he had as a WWI veteran and a learned University professor. this shows that the emergence of future progressive tyrants must be fought early, while everyone else is not cowed.
Thanks Neo, I’ll add that first one to my long list of books I want to read (If I can’t die until I’ve read all the books on my want-to-read list I’ll live to be 150 years old!) as it does sounds rather fascinating.
I’ve read some of Victor Klemperer’s stuff and agree with your recommendation – great stuff!
Here’s another that, along with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is very good: This is Berlin which is a collection of William Shirer’s broadcast transcriptions. It really cannot be read by itself as it doesn’t tell a complete history; but, it shows how the news from Germany was being heard in the US at that time.
If I recall correctly, Shirer was the last American Journalist to leave Nazi occupied territory and his broadcasts were getting too censored toward the end. Interestingly, his broadcasts (all taped and many secretly transported through Switzerland) were broadcast in the US with a disclaimer at the beginning to remind listeners that what was being reported wasn’t the whole story as much of the broadcast had to get past the Nazi “censors.” Imagine CNN or some other news organization including such a disclaimer today! Peter Arnett didn’t tell his listening public that Saddam had “minders” following/taking him everywhere until AFTER Saddam’s fall. Instead, Mr. Arnett kept claiming “exclusive” coverage of the “real” story. What hogwash!
And, that bring me to, Neo, what you say: “I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.” “
I couldn’t agree more; but, knowing how far left our higher education is in this country I cannot help but wonder if such a course wouldn’t be used by most educators as a way of promoting partisan left-leaning politics and condemning the Republicans.
Most of our educators seem hell-bent on left-leaning minders telling us what to think, say, and do – Political correctness, “Hate” speech laws, Obamacare (buy health insurance or pay a fine)
In a parliamentary system, Hitler could act crazy and he would still get a slice of the pie. In the US, if you don’t act ‘electable’ enough for the two mainstream parties, you get nothing except a bill for all that stuff you spend on campaign trips.
To amplify a point Dennis touched on above: It’s impossible to understand the rise of the Nazis without considering the Soviet Union and Communism in general. For 15 years the world had been hearing about oppression, atrocities, and mass deaths caused by the revolution, the civil war, the Polish-Soviet War, and so on. Despite their similar socialist roots and philosophy, the Nazis hated Communists, and for many they seemed like much less of a threat.
Unfortunately, left-leaning historians downplay or ignore this angle, preferring to portray Nazis as capitalist, racist right-wing conservatives who just happened to appeal to a lot of people.
As I understand the situation, the Communist menace may have fed directly into the anti-Semitism of the German lunatic fringe since a large portion of the original leaders of the Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish. They were not practicing Jews, but the racist anti-Semites wouldn’t have bothered making that important distinction.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler talked extensively about the Communist threat and he discussed his own growing anti-Semitism. While Hitler’s demonization of Jews was ugly, there was no call in the book to murder Jews. As Neo said Hitler lied extensively and if he had plans to kill Jews he kept those plans to himself.
Darwin’s book The Ascent of Man fed directly into German racism since it provided scientific justification for racism and racial conflict. That book deals directly with human evolution and about how less fit individuals and races are replaced by more fit individuals and races. Scientific eugenics was a big deal among intellectuals both in the USA and in Europe at the time. There was an important distinction. The Nazis extended the eugenics from sterilizing the unfit to actually killing them.
The Nazis began their genocide by attacks on Germans themselves. Before cleansing the race of foreign elements they began by cleansing Germany of the mentally and physically unfit Germans. Disposing of the Jews was just the next logical step. The Nazis justified killed defectives by claiming that their lives were not worth living. (Incidentally from a moral standpoint the left is not much different. They rationalize abortion with very similar arguments. That is why the left hates the fact that Trig Palin exists even though his mother knew that he was a Down’s baby before he was born.)
There is another important element in the German’s descent into madness which is not often mentioned. Higher Biblical criticism began in German Universities and was very influential. While some of their findings have withstood the test of time, much more has failed. Higher criticism was especially damaging to Protestant Christians who accepted it since for them the Bible had been their infallible moral authority. Destroying the Bible damaged the German’s moral compass and set set them adrift. Higher criticism began with the assumption that origin and evolution of the Bible could be studied just like ordinary literature and surprise, surprise the critics ended up discovering exactly what they had assumed the the Bible is ordinary literature.
Germany was at one time an intensely religious society.
Looking through a contemporary prism, it’s hard to imagine a time before the ubiquitous presence of world wide news and entertainment, in all its real time immediacy.
“The Nazis did this in an age where communication was regionally limited. One could say one thing in Bremen and a totally contradictory thing in Munich and each would be old news before the contradiction could have time to be noticed.’
Just to expand on this comment, what role did mass communication play? Even though radio technology existed fairly early in the century, mass communication was dependent on mass production of the radio. In the USA, the mass production of radios did not occur until the 30s, when “radio ownership went from 1 in 5 homes in, 1931, to 4 in 5 homes, in 1938”, per Wikipedia.
Barry Mishkind – The Eclectic Engineer: From 1933, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels used the radio as his primary medium (along with the “Wochenschauen” in the cinemas and the centralized press). He introduced the mass production of relative cheap radio sets, the so-called “Volksempfaenger,” so that all Germans had access to radio reception in their homes as well at their working places.”
Dennis: Agreed. Excellent points.
In reading most of the previous comments, and being one who doesn’t have enough time for much more than Readers Digest Condensed versions, I once again point out, a lot of these points were summarized in Liberal Fascism.
Regarding a course for the young, I highly recommend
The Great Courses: Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century .
They all promised Utopia.
Ymarsakar: “That’s why it takes a totalitarian regime to exploit these things for more power. Most normal governments aren’t thinking quite that far ahead, they just want to solve the temporary security problem, not use it to further increase the fear of the people so that they can produce a coup de tat.”
That’s an important point.
These movements have a cancerous aspect which is a big reason they’re tough to first prevent and then defeat.
Cancer uses the body’s own, necessary functions to take hold and then thrive. To beat cancer, you need to fight your own body, which is self-destructive, because what it uses to live is what you need to live.
An example is the expanded government surveillance and seizer powers in the USA Patriot Act. The thing is, those anti-liberty measures really are necessary and perhaps not even sufficient to counter the terrorists. The Patriot Act measures were proposed in 1995 by President Clinton in response chiefly to rising al Qaeda and, secondarily, concern about domestic terrorists. Congress watered down Clinton’s 1995 proposed acts over Clinton’s objections to pass the AEDPA of 1996 (PL 104-132), but then later passed Clinton’s 1995 proposed acts when Bush re-proposed them as the USA Patriot Act in response to 9/11.
Are the measures needed to counter real enemy dangers? Yes. But do they also risk abuse and open the way for exploitation? Also yes.
Best to have, one, the needed measures, two, wielded by the right people. Two is tougher to ensure than one is to implement.
In that regard, PapayaSF and others bring up an important contextual point. The Nazis were able to rise because the Communists were a real, urgent, and existential threat. The Germans faced a choice of A or B because C, the Weimer Republic, proved to be too weak. The preferred social choice on principle was simply not competitively robust enough in real terms, ie, the activist game.
To be fair to the Germans who had to make fundamental life decisions – rational or not – in their social context, they needed C (Weimar Republic) to be strong enough to prevent the competitively robust A (Nazis) and counter competitively robust B (Communists) in the activist game. It’s not unlike the zero-sum competition between (relative) liberals, autocrats, and Islamists in the Middle East in their activist game.
If we want our preferred C to win out, principle is not enough. The social preference needs to be competitively robust enough in the activist social cultural/political arena to take on and defeat the alternative competitors and dominate.
Like the Communists that the Nazis counterpointed for the Germans, the social cultural/political alternatives for us are also limited, competitive, and zero-sum. Most Germans preferred C, but C was too weak competitively – C was not activist enough for the activist game versus dedicated activists like the Nazis and Communists.
The question for us is whether American proponents of our version of C will become activist enough to compete against the dedicated activist alternatives here in the only social cultural/political game there is.
Because if C is relatively weak in activist terms, no matter how preferable its principles are, then it won’t be socially viable in the face of stronger competitive activists that pragmatically exploit social conditions as they are, like the Nazis did.
Lee Benham: “The Nazi’s were very effective in using propaganda once they came to power. The changed votes in a few weeks.”
Basic. Narrative contest for the zeitgeist of the activist game.
I like this book to explain the power of socialist ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/Heaven-On-Earth-Rise-Socialism/dp/1893554783
It should be kept in mind that Hitler and the Nazis never got more than about 37% of the vote. Much of the rest of their rise to power was due to the machinations of Hindenburg’s advisers:
Much more on their wheelings & dealings that brought Hitler to power here.
William Shirer (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime. One thing that astonished him was how easily so many Communists became Nazis. They are, of course, slightly heretical versions of the same evil political philosophy.
The Left likes to portray them as poles apart, but that is nonsense. When Hitler and Stalin began the wars as allies attacking Poland, the Progressives in America were frantic in their demands that America not support Great Britain in its titanic battle against Germany. That changed overnight when Hitler began Operation Barbarossa and attacked Russia.
At their black, rotten cores, Fascists, Progressives, Nazis, and Communists are essentially the same.
This is referred to by historians as the “Sonderweg” – a thesis arguing that Germany, for a variety of reasons, was inevitably going to produce Nazism or something similar. It dominated the postwar scholarship for decades but it doesn’t have much support among academics anymore. Authors of popular histories, however, have yet to catch up.
Scholarship for the past fifteen years at least has tended to do just that. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is a good example.
Rachelle…”how easily many communists became Nazis”
In 1933/1934, 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe, from Holland to Turkey. While in Germany, he was invited to stay overnight at the home of a young working-class man, and noticed Nazi regalia everywhere, and an SA uniform hanging neatly ironed. When Paddy said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, the man laughed and sat down on his bed and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures or Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite!” He went on to say that he and his friends “We used to beat hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us…Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me!” His old friends had all changed sides as well; the only problem he saw was that there were hardly and socialists or communists left to beat up. His parents did not share his enthusiasm, he said; they were “old-fashioned,” with his father still talking about the greatness of Bismarck and the Kaiser and Hindenburg and his mother focused only on the church.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/45701.html
Ann:
Hindenburg hated and feared Hitler but unwisely thought he could be controlled. He greatly underestimated his ability to weasel out of all such restrictions. Hindenburg kept devising arrangements he thought would contain him, but Hindenburg did not understand how audacious Hitler would be, and how clever:
By the way, that spot-on quote about Hitler doesn’t mean that Ludendorff (whose first name was Erich, not Paul, by the way) wasn’t somewhat of a nutcase himself. Here’s some info on him:
Oh, but it was taught! Have you not read about the Third Wave experiment in a history class in Palo Alto in 1967? It’s very chilling.
snopercod:
That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about, although that has some value, too.
I’m talking about a more conventionally didactic history course that studies many tyrannies in history, particularly the history of the West but it could included other cultures. It would describe step by step how it was done in each case, how the people were either convinced or tricked, and what to watch out for.
For example, just to take a very simple example, watch out for a cult of personality.
Hindenburg also didn’t realize what self-serving men two of his closest advisers, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, were. This does not make for edifying reading:
What struck me the most in all that was that the Nazis got 5% fewer votes than they’d gotten in the first Reichstag elections that year. Voters having second thoughts, or just a lack of interest? Wonder what, if anything, that drop in votes signified to Papen and Schleicher, or if they were simply interested in their own power plays.
I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.”
Seems to me most of the people that one would expect to teach such a course are likely to be part of the effort.
I’m sure they’re fully aware that teaching students to recognize what they’re trying to do might not be a good idea…
Blaque:
Well, I’d be writing the curriculum and supervising the teachers, of course!
Who Goes Nazi is very impressive! I think the fourth paragraph has a great deal to do with the current mindset of the Left. Please read it all.
http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
“The pressure I am under is greater than in the war, and for the first time in my life I feel political hatred for a group (as I did not during the war), a deadly hatred. In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.”…
This is precisely what I felt when I was forced into the abattoir of “Obamacare” against my will. We are being enslaved, step by irreversible step. And I hate them for that. For the first time in my life, I feel no loyalty to “our” government, only bitter contempt.
Another excellent book on this subject: “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy” by Eric Metaxas. It’s about the life of a world class theologian who hailed from an astonishingly elite German family, from his youth during WWI to his eventual imprisonment and death by the Nazis as a result of his involvement with the resistance. Much of it chronicles the Nazi rise to power through the eyes of an incredibly bright and articulate man with acute moral clarity. It examines the spiritual/human failings of a people on an individual, cultural and political level; the lies, delusions, willful blindness, foolishness, cruelty, bigotry, absurd politics, manipulation, ruthless will to power and inevitable demise. The past as prologue.
When I was growing up they made us read 1984, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm.
Ask almost any high school student today about these books and watch the blank expression….
Ludendorff was Hindenburg’s second during the first World War- his nickname was General “Was sagt’s du?”; owing to the fact that every time someone asked Hindenburg a question he’d turn and say “Nah- Ludendorff, was sagt’s du?”
Teaching a course in tyranny in today’s leftist dominated academia would probably run from Mussolini through Bush. Somehow, Lenin, Mao and Castro wouldn’t get included.
The original “Nazi Seizure” I read in college 40 years ago didn’t include the real name of the town. The town was Northeim, about 20 miles north of Gottinggen.
I read an Eric Larson book a few years ago called In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. It was about the American ambassador an his daughter in Berlin right before WWII and was a pretty good read. It’s not a deep history book but it’s a different perspective then you usually see.
Another I enjoyed was “when money dies” about the inflation post wwi.
What you reference in “Nazi Seizure” about normal persons’ abandonment of civil society during the early post-1933 years, and the reason for it, rings true. My wife is a Brazilian of German descent. As young men in 1935, her father and her mother’s two brothers were recruited to go to Germany from Brazil. They worked for a year in Party construction battalions, but when their year was up they all opted to return to Brazil rather than join the German army. They not only found the propaganda oppressive, but the lower level officials to be in general personally obnoxious.
Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer is a very detailed work, more than 500 pages. It is the story of remarkable spiritual orientation developing at a young age, culminating in a Christ-like self-sacrifice against the forces of evil.
“When Money Dies” is not enjoyable; it is scary. But it is eminently readable, a very important explanation of the monstrous, intentionally-started German inflation of 1922-23, which birthed the social chaos that enabled the Nazi rise. There is much to be learned from this book. I have given away multiple copies as eye-openers. Most members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee have probably not read it.
Knowledge of post-WWI German history and its cast of characters will help in reading both.
Scott@227am:
I read it all. The 4th paragraph is about the success of the Gramscian way in turning vulnerable people into members of organized amoral mob in which they do things they might otherwise only briefly think about. And the opposition. But it doesn’t adequately address the in-between, the fabled independent American who is sometimes left and sometimes not.
““When Money Dies” is not enjoyable; it is scary.”
Well yes that is true too. Terrifying stuff! But I enjoyed it in that I felt it added to my knowledge of what was actually going on by focusing on a period of time and a subject that often gets skipped.