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.

The Cost Of Compromise.

Not Brownshirts, Greenshirts: If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

IF THE GREENS are to survive 19 September, they’ll need to draw inspiration from – of all people – the Nazis. Preposterous? Only if you refuse to understand that both the national-socialist and green movements have at their core an unwavering conviction that if they fail, then everything they hold dear will be lost. What separates the Greens from the Nazis is, of course, what they hold dear. Hitler and his followers were fighting for a myth – the German volk. The Greens are fighting for the survival of a very real and very vulnerable biosphere.

But what sort of inspiration could possibly be drawn from the political tactics of the most evil political party in human history?

The answer can be summed-up in a single word: compromise. If you believe yourself to be in the midst of an existential struggle; and that every day which fails to bring you closer to absolute victory brings you one day closer to absolute defeat; then compromise isn’t just ill-advised, it’s morally indefensible. The goal must be power. Not power in combination with others, but power alone. Power that can be wielded without reference to anybody else. Absolute victory – the salvation of the biosphere – can only be secured by winning absolute power.

This was Adolf Hitler’s crucial insight. He looked at the Weimar Republic, with its pure system of proportional representation, its multitude of competing parties, its fragile and ineffectual coalitions, and he bet his entire movement on the German electorate growing increasingly impatient with the political paralysis in Berlin. For a few years, from the mid-1920s until the onset of the Great Depression in late-1929, it looked as though he would lose his bet. But the collapse of the German economy, the descent of millions into poverty and despair, and the complete failure of “democratic” politics to meet the crisis, saw the Nazi’s share of the vote skyrocket.

Hitler’s contemporaries expected him to do what any other party leader would do in the face of such unanticipated electoral success: cut a deal. But the Nazi leader wasn’t interested in deals. Why would he enter into a coalition with the very parties who had proved themselves so incapable of doing anything to alleviate Germany’s suffering? Openly contemptuous of his electoral rivals, he didn’t promise to work with them, he promised to abolish them. Only one party, he said, could rescue Germany: the National Socialist German Workers Party. It would govern alone, or it would not govern at all.

As conditions in Germany grew steadily worse, and as the political centre crumbled and fell apart, it became clearer and clearer to the state bureaucracy, the army and the large capitalists, that if the Nazis were not given what they wanted, then an increasingly desperate German electorate would shift its support to the Communist Party. Rather than make a red revolution inevitable, the powers-that-be made a brown revolution possible. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Within six months his National Socialists were wielding absolute power. It was given to them to save Germany, but tragically they came close to destroying it. The human cost of Nazism’s fanatical pursuit of racial purity was colossal and its ultimate failure inevitable. Why? Because the German volk wasn’t real.

But anthropogenic global warming – climate change – is very real. And every day that is lost to compromise and drift does indeed bring global ecological catastrophe closer. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, everything human-beings hold dear is at risk of being overwhelmed by a disaster greater than any which has hitherto confronted human civilisation. To avert this impending global tragedy an international political movement is required. A global movement which absolutely refuses to compromise with the political, bureaucratic and corporate entities whose failure to take decisive action to combat climate change imperils human survival – along with that of just about every other life form on the planet.

The leaders of green parties around the world have largely chosen to turn their faces from this most urgent of political priorities. Rather than take a bet on the peoples of the world growing increasingly willing to throw their support behind an uncompromising international movement dedicated to radically reducing greenhouse emissions and implementing a “Green New Deal” to redirect the world economy away from fossil fuels and exploitative industrial production, these green leaders have opted to “do a deal”. They have joined hands with the very people who created the crisis and who have consistently declined to end it.

New Zealand’s Green Party has proved to be no exception in this respect. Its co-leader, James Shaw, not only refuses to bet on the people coming round to the need for urgent and ruthless change, but he has also fetishized “compromise” to the point where any attempt to draw a line in the sand is met with a rolling of eyes and statements like:

“Finding the path of least resistance. There’s that horrendous phrase about politics being the art of the possible, which can be read two ways.

“You can do things, it’s a really expansive notion. And there are some moments where we have changed things.

“And then there are others where you can only do what is possible. Maybe moving from naivety to experience is being able to live in both those worlds at the same time.”

Unfortunately for Shaw, humanity has only one world to live in, and it is running out of time. As the climate crisis deepens, and the failure of democratic politics to adequately address the need for radical change opens the way for more uncompromising parties, the politicians who continue to throw in their lot with the problem, rather than the solution, will be swept aside. For Shaw and his increasingly irresolute colleagues the electoral broom is approaching with unnerving speed.

Over the past three years, all the voters have received from the New Zealand Greens are pallid non-solutions. These, the fruit of the party’s craven unwillingness to call Labour and NZ First’s bluff, have been justified as the best outcomes available from a dispiriting range of “realistic” options. Together, they have brought the Greens’ nothing but a steadily declining share of the Party Vote. Political “realism” is Labour’s brand. If all they are offered in September is a choice between compromises of ever-decreasing effectiveness, then many Green supporters may elect to make no choice at all.

The only virtue to which the Nazis may lay claim is their willingness to risk everything for the opportunity to put their ideas to the test. Their unwillingness to compromise with reason cost humanity dearly. How supremely tragic (and ironic) it will be if the Greens’ willingness to compromise with greed and selfishness ends up costing humanity everything it’s got.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 June 2020.