Friday 19 February 2021

Strength That Does Not Fail.

Sweet Surrender: By 1933, Adolf Hitler was the last political leader left standing, and his Nazis the only party Germany had yet to try. It was ever thus. Dictators and dictatorships succeed by being the only medicine a desperately sick nation hasn’t swallowed; the only strength that hasn’t failed.

NOT ALL DICTATORSHIPS look like Burma. When the troops are out on the streets firing rubber bullets at high-school students and shutting down the Internet for the second day in a row, what are you looking at? Effectively, you’re watching a dictatorship that is failing. No matter how you measure it: economically, socially or politically; the price of ruling by terror is enormous and irrecoverable. Which is why a truly successful dictatorship doesn’t look anything like a dictatorship – until you cross it.

Knowing how the fascist story ended, it is very hard to grasp how many people came away from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany full of admiration. Before the invasions, before the Holocaust, when Germany’s economy was booming and Italy’s trains were running on time, it seemed to many people – Winston Churchill, Henry Ford and King Edward VIII among them – that the fascists had much to teach the world about the best ways to go about restoring economic prosperity and fostering national unity.

Hitler’s regime, in particular, left a great many of the world’s politicians and journalists ideologically mystified. Germany, after all, had boasted the largest and most energetic communist movement in Europe. It’s Social Democratic Party was similarly imposing. How, then, had Hitler and his Nazi Party subdued both parties so quickly and so easily? By 1935, two years into the Nazi regime, it was as if Germany’s fifty years of continuous left-wing progress had been an historical mirage. Could it really be true that, as Hitler had argued all along (and as the name of his party emphatically confirmed) socialism would always come second to nationalism?

The explanation for Hitler’s success begins and ends with the Great Depression. That global economic catastrophe hit Germany harder than any of the other major industrial powers. With millions of men and women out of work, the burden of popular expectations fell upon the parties of the left and their powerful trade union allies. These were the politicians who would rescue the fatherland. Except, they didn’t. Indeed, the Left proved singularly unequal to the task of saving Germany. This historic failure left the socialists’ working-class supporters feeling bitterly disillusioned and betrayed – many beyond recall.

Which left Hitler as the last man standing, and his Nazis as the only party Germany had yet to try. It was ever thus. Dictators and dictatorships succeed by being the only medicine a desperately sick nation hasn’t swallowed; the only strength that hasn’t failed.

Later this year (maybe) the world’s athletes will gather in Tokyo for the XXXII Olympiad. Once again the world will thrill to the potent symbolism of the Olympic torchbearer running up the steps of the grand stadium to ignite the Olympic flame. Thousands of doves will be released in the name of international peace and amity. The world will cheer.

That every one of those “traditions” emerged from the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Hitler’s Berlin, is a deeply troubling historical detail. That the world’s admiration for Nazi Germany peaked that same year owes much to the huge success of the Nazis’ Olympic spectacle. Nor can there be much doubt that if Hitler had been assassinated in the months between the unification of Germany and Austria in March of 1938, and the onset of the Munich Crisis in September, then he would have been remembered as one of Germany’s greatest leaders.

Those observers around the world celebrating the political demise of Donald Trump would do well to contemplate the extraordinary contingencies of history. That so many Americans still believe in his star bears witness to the enduring power of the last-possible-saviour myth.

Nor should Trump’s opponents assume that the events of the past twelve months have discredited Trump. Hard though it may be to accept, the former President’s red-capped followers read these events through a radically different lens. What they believe they saw was their hero ambushed by a global pandemic cooked up by America’s enemies abroad, and then robbed of his presidency by the corrupt machinations of America’s enemies within.

If Americans are not to elect their own dictator to power in 2024, then Joe Biden and his Democrats will have to do what the German Left so tragically failed to do in 1932. They will have to give America a medicine that works – and a strength that does not fail.


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 February 2021.

13 comments:

David Stone said...


"If Americans are not to elect their own dictator to power in 2024, then Joe Biden and his Democrats will have to do what the German Left so tragically failed to do in 1932. They will have to give America a medicine that works – and a strength that does not fail."
Well that's not going to happen is it !
My idea of what won Hitler his support in Germany was firstly and throughout his extraordinary rhetorical ability,and secondly effectively creating a sovereign money supply ; firstly to enable the economy to move from under the crippling weight of their WW1 debt impositions; and then to run the economy to include everyone . The Jews probably were generally identified with the private bankers the country escaped from.
What he did was probably genuinely good for Germany right up until he started murdering Jews and Gypsies and waging war on his neighbours.
As for Trump, well I don't think he is a Hitler. But if he has actually got some brains in there somewhere, and he wants to carry on in politics, he now has the opportunity to gather around himself a team of genuine allies who agree with what he wants to do with the economy and in foreign policy and will go into the 2024 presidential election with a team that will at least try to enact a programme instead of ankle tapping him at every move.
It is going to be interesting.
D J S

Guerilla Surgeon said...

"What he did was probably genuinely good for Germany right up until he started murdering Jews and Gypsies and waging war on his neighbours."

Er... no. The German economy was on a knife edge for the whole of the Nazi period. The only thing that really saved them was Schacht who managed to keep it on a roughly even keel until he was fired by Hitler, largely over his criticism of excessive defence spending. German per capita income was half that of the US, and about 1/3 less than that of Britain. And contrary to popular belief, German industry wasn't particularly efficient apart from a few very large vertically integrated corporations. Germany had a higher proportion of people working in agriculture than Britain or France, and that's usually a sign of lack of development. The hourly rate for an unskilled worker was 59 pfennig in the 1930s and this hardly went up under the Nazis. This is when a kilogram of butter cost 31 pfennig. And a cigarette cost 3 pfennig. The proportion of people who lived comfortable lives in Germany was less than that of either Britain and France, and far less than that in the US. The housing situation was dire and Hitler did nothing about this either.
All Hitler did was soak up some of the unemployment by expanding the army. Whether that's good for the average worker in a factory I doubt somehow.
Trump may or may not stand in 2024 – if he's even still alive given his diet in general lack of exercise. But the man is obviously suffering from dementia as a number of qualified people have said. If he does stand he almost certainly won't win, given that the Republican Party's fragmenting so he almost certainly only be a spoiler, and guarantee democratic control of the government for years.

Anonymous said...

Was it actually timing? The world was already coming out of the depression in 1934. A Labour government in New South Wales was elected too early, in 1931, and failed. New Zealand's Labour government in 1935 benefitted from the same wave of returning prosperity as Hitler. A good essay.

Nick J said...

Chris, that is a very Left wing interpretation of the Nazi phenomenon. As an alternative have you read the late great AJP Taylors Course of German History? It paints a far broader story in which a Hitler figure is the likely outcome of the events of over a thousand years. In this time the national character of a nation are compounded, a far more powerful and primeval force than the overlay of ideologies of Left or Right.

With a Tayloresque view of the long run of national historic character I see Trump far more as the likely outcome of the failure of the US plutocracy to deliver the benefits of American exceptionalism to the masses. Trump represented the faux resurrection of the American dream, delivered by that other American archetype the snake oil salesman.

AB said...

It remains to be seen whether Biden's donors will allow him to do what is necessary - some of it maybe, all of it, almost certainly not. In any case - the historical analogy in this piece has the timing out. It is a mistake to see Biden as an enfeebled bastion against an incipient American fascism. A sort of fascism (with American characteristics) arrived with Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Biden is just another administrator of its legacy.

greywarbler said...

Wat a difficult time in Germany in 1932. About 30 competing political parties! That reinforces my belief that NZ needs to maintain a threshhold of 4% of the vote and limit how many extra pollies can ride forth on the win of one electorate.

For the first time in German history political parties had real power. They could determine policy and had patronage available for supporters. However, the large number of political parties made coalitions necessary and made it difficult to obtain and maintain legislative majorities. At times there were more than thirty political parties on the ballot although only about six commanded substantial voting blocs.

Making life even more difficult for the Republic were extremist parties on both sides of the political spectrum who were opposed to the existence of the Republic itself. The most important of these radical anti-Republican parties were the communists on the left and the National Socialists (Nazis) on the right.

Most of the 22 Weimar government coalitions were made up of members of the Catholic Center, Social Democratic, Democratic and People’s parties. https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/readings/weimar-political-parties

Andrew Nichols said...

If Americans are not to elect their own dictator to power in 2024, then Joe Biden and his Democrats will have to do what the German Left so tragically failed to do in 1932. They will have to give America a medicine that works – and a strength that does not fail.

Good luck with that. It was Clinton Biden politics that caused the rise of Trump. Serve the plutocrats who fund them wile pacifying the masses some Land Rights for Gay Whales legislation. All the while rampaging about and pillaging the earth in the name of National Security like all POTUS post war have done.

I.M Fletcher said...

Come on. Did you really just compare Trump to Hitler? Really? Trump was the only thing standing in the way of the political elites and their lust for power and money. Now they have free reign. If there's anyone like a dictator, just look at Biden, signing upwardss of 40 executive orders in his first week alone, while surrounded by a barbwire topped fence that is still there. You're sounding the alarm about the wrong side. It will always be Democrats who are the authoritarians. We're already seeing it, and in only a few months it will be even clearer.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

Jesus wept, there are still people in New Zealand who will stick up for Trump? The only thing standing in the way of the political elites? Trump is a member of the elites, albeit a populist one who pretends to be a man of the people. He gave the wealthy a tax break.... And that's about the sum total of his list of accomplishments. His whole family made money off the US government, himself by overcharging government functionaries such as the Secret Service to stay at his hotels. He gave jobs to his children who had absolutely no qualifications for them, and was probably most corrupt president of the last hundred years.
Biden has signed so many executive orders because he's had to reverse all the stupid things that Trump did. And he was surrounded by barbed wire because you may have heard – just recently a crowd of fuckwits invaded the Capitol building with intent to overthrow the legitimately elected government. And I noticed that Republicans as well as Democrats fled from them. I wouldn't put Trump in the Hitler class, but there are obvious similarities. The man is completely selfish, he exploited the state for his personal gain, he surrounded himself with yes-men, and made the government absolutely chaotic. Hitler of course did the latter because he wanted to keep his flunkies concentrated on fighting each other rather than replacing him, Trump simply because he was incompetent.
The next few months will be instructive, I hope you come back and explain how authoritarian the Democrats are.

Tom Hunter said...

then Joe Biden and his Democrats will have to do what the German Left so tragically failed to do in 1932. They will have to give America a medicine that works – and a strength that does not fail.

This is sad. Biden of course is just a figurehead, moving as easily to supporting whatever his more Left-Wing staff put in front of him, as he did in the early 70's with his good mates Talmadge and other remnants of the Southern Caucus, or anti-abortion or anti-gay marriage or boasting about being the prime mover for the mid-90's crime bill that landed thousands of Black in jail.

But all this stuff are mere Executive Orders. Making them move through Congress will be something else, something he's not capable of, and probably never was.

But the real kicker here is that the fruits of previous such efforts, obtained by far greater, more capable and more competent Democrat Presidents like Roosevelt and Johnson, have themselves failed to produce the goods. When the USA was wracked by race riots in 1968, Democrats could point to the various acts of The Great Society and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and say that their positive effects had not come quickly enough. And most reasonable people acknowledged that truth.

But what now? How much more obvious the failure of such vast programmes than that their supposed recipients are angrier than in the 1960's. What's the US Left solution in the face of BLM? More government programmes? More money? Or more radical efforts designed to suppress "White Supremacy"?

The terrible truth is that the US Left has no more answers to give beyond radicalism that their very own forebears drew back from.

Jens Meder said...


Tom Hunter -
And what is the medicine from the Left that works and they failed to introduce ?
Apart from Socialism or state monopoly capitalism, what other proposition is there from the Left - or the Right's plutocracy capitalism, leading towards widening socio-economic polarization into Haves and Have-Nots ?
The welfare state principle starts to become unsustainable and self-destructive from the moment people increasingly begin to rely on wealth redistribution rather than wealth creation. ( E.g.3 and more generations of welfare beneficiaries.)
Why have we not got at least a discussion on the pros and cons of "People's Capitalism", the "Third Way" upwards for all, through all citizens becoming owners of at least a minimally meaningful level(or more) of capital (i.e. WEALTH) eventually ?

swordfish said...

I'd take issue with aspects of this passage, Chris: (Quote)"The explanation for Hitler’s success begins and ends with the Great Depression. That global economic catastrophe hit Germany harder than any of the other major industrial powers. With millions of men and women out of work, the burden of popular expectations fell upon the parties of the left and their powerful trade union allies. These were the politicians who would rescue the fatherland. Except, they didn’t. Indeed, the Left proved singularly unequal to the task of saving Germany. This historic failure left the socialists’ working-class supporters feeling bitterly disillusioned and betrayed – many beyond recall."(End Quote)

Implies a hefty Unemployed & Working Class swing from the Left to the Nazis.

But sophisticated quantitative / psephological analyses (undertaken esp in 1960s-90s) show the unemployed, the industrial working-class, the Big City working-class & previous Communist (KPD) voters were the very *least* likely to swing to the Nazis, while previous Social Democrat (SPD) supporters were clearly well below average in their propensity to swing far Right (although as, by far the most popular single Party, SPD was always going to contribute more in sheer raw numbers than you would expect from a sole focus on percentages).

New Nazi voters in the early 30s German Federal Elections disproportionately came courtesy of mainstream Right parties - both liberal & conservative.

sumsuch said...

So disgusting, democracy didn't matter a fuck to Trump's voters. The Democrats pretending they have a loyal opposition is ulcerating. What happens when you let the powerful have their way.