Posted on 16-6-2003
Fascism
Made Easy
By Bernard Weiner*, The Crisis Papers, 09 June 2003
If my email is any indication, a goodly number of
folks wonder if they're living in America in 2003 or Germany
in 1933.
All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization
of society, identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant
state of fear and anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive
laws that shred constitutional guarantees of due process, wars
of aggression launched on weaker nations, the desire to assume
global hegemony, the merging of corporate and governmental interests,
vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace that tends
to believe the slogans and lies it's fed without asking too
many questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the
administration's reckless adventurism abroad and police-state
policies at home, etc. etc.
The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003
and Germany seventy years earlier are not the same, and Bush
certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But there are enough disquieting
similarities in the two periods at least to see what we can
learn -- cautionary tales, as it were -- and then figure out
what to do with our knowledge.
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The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from
our own observations, and various writers -- from Shakespeare
to Sinclair Lewis ("It Can't Happen Here") -- have
shown us how easily populations can be manipulated by leaders
skillfully playing on patriotic emotion or racial or nationalist
feelings.
Whole peoples, like individuals, can become irrational
on occasion -- sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes for years,
sometimes for decades. Ambition, hatred, fear can get the better
of them, and gross lies told by their leaders can deceive their
otherwise rational minds. It has happened, it happens, it will
continue to happen.
One of the most outrageous and horrific examples of an
entire country falling into national madness probably was Hitler's
Germany from 1933-45. The resulting world war was disastrous,
leading to more than 40,000,000 deaths.
A good share of what we know about how this happened
in Germany usually comes to us many years later from post-facto
books, looking backward to the horror. There are very few examples
of accounts written from the inside at the very time the events
were unfolding.
One such book is "Defying Hitler," by the noted
German journalist/author Sebastian Haffner. The manuscript was
found, stuffed away in a drawer, by Haffner's son in 1999 after
his father's death at age 91. Published in 2000, the book became
an immediate best-seller in Germany and was published last year
in English, translated by the son, Oliver Pretzel. (His father's
original name was Raimund Pretzel; as Sebastian Haffner, he
went on to a highly successful career, writing in England during
the war and then later back in Germany. He authored "From
Bismarck to Hitler" and "The Meaning of Hitler,"
among many other works.)
"Defying Hitler" is a brilliantly written social
document, begun (and ended abruptly) in 1939; even though it
fills in the reader on German history from the First World War
on, its major focus is on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed
power, Haffner was a 25-year-old law student, in-training to
join the German courts as a junior administrator.
You find yourself reading this book in amazement; there
is so much historical perspective, so much sweep of what was
going on and predictions of what later was to happen, so many
insights into what led so many ordinary Germans to join with
or acquiesce to the Nazi program -- how could anyone so young
be so prescient in the midst of the brutal sordidness that was
Nazism? (Indeed, some critics claimed that Haffner must have
rewritten the book decades later; every page of the original
manuscript was sent to laboratories, which authenticated that
it indeed had been composed in 1939.)
The Individual in Society
What distinguishes "Defying Hitler," in
addition to its superb writing, is that Haffner focuses on "little
people" like himself, rather than on the machinations of
leaders. He wants to explore how ordinary Germans, especially
non-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans, permitted themselves to be swallowed
whole into the Hitlerian maw.
Haffner makes occasional broad pronouncements about German
character traits ("As Bismarck once remarked in a famous
speech, moral courage is, in any case, a rare virtue in Germany,
but it deserts a German completely the moment he puts on a uniform"),
but he devotes a good deal of his attention to the question
of personal responsibility. If you read ordinary history books,
he says, "you get the impression that no more than a few
dozen people are involved, who happen to be 'at the helm of
the ship of state' and whose deeds and decisions form what is
called history.
"According to this view, the history of the present
decade [the 1930s] is a kind of chess game among Hitler, Mussolini,
Chiang Kai-Shek, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Daladier, and a number
of other men whose names are on everybody's lips. We anonymous
others seem at best to be the objects of history, pawns in the
chess game, who may be pushed forward or left standing, sacrificed
or captured, but whose lives, for what they are worth, take
place in a totally different w orld, unrelated to what is happening
on the chessboard.
"...It may seem a paradox, but it is nonetheless
the simple truth, to say that on the contrary, the decisive
historical events take place among us, the anonymous masses.
The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless
against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and
almost unconsciously by the population at large...Decisions
that influence the course of history arise out of the individual
experiences of thousands or millions of individuals."
The Riddle of Hitler's Rise
Haffner tries to solve the riddle of the easy acceptance
of fascism in Hitler's Third Reich. In March of 1933, a majority
of German citizens did not vote for Hitler. "What happened
to that majority? Did they die? Did they disappear from the
face of the earth? Did they become Nazis at this late stage?
How was it possible that there was not the slightest visible
reaction from them" as Hitler, installed by the authorities
as Chancellor, began slowly and then more quickly consolidating
power and moving Germany from a democratic state to a totalitarian
one?
All along the way, Hitler would propose or actually promulgate
regulations that sliced away at German citizens' freedoms --
usually aimed at small, vulnerable sectors of society (labor
unionists, communists, Jews, mental defectives, et al.) -- and
few said or did anything to indicate serious displeasure. In
the early days, on those rare occasions when there was concerted
negative reaction, Hitler would back off a bit. And so the Nazis
grew bolder and more voracious as they continued slicing away
at civil society. Many Germans (including some of Hitler's original
corporate backers) were convinced Nazism would collapse as it
became more and more extreme; others chose denial. It was easier
to look the other way.
Haffner saw what was starting to happen, but retreated
into his law studies. Even while the Brownshirts were beating
and killing people in the streets, the courts with which he
worked remained a solid bulwark in defense of traditional democratic
principles. And then one day, the Nazis simply marched into
the Berlin court buildings and took over Germany's judicial
system. Haffner was shaken to the core, but continued studying
for his final exams.
Shortly thereafter, he and his fellow students were dispatched
to a kind of boot camp for ideological and military training.
Haffner, a Christian anti-Nazi, found himself, to his astonishment
and horror, wearing jackboots, a swastika and learning how to
kill.
In an inner monologue, Haffner says: "There are
some things I must never do: never say anything that I would
be ashamed of later. Shooting at targets is all right. But not
at people. I must not commit myself, or sell my soul...Oh dear!
It dawned on me that I had already relinquished and lost everything.
I wore a uniform with a swastika armband. I stood to attention
and cleaned my rifle....But that did not count: it was not me
that did it; it was a game and I was acting a part.
"Only what if, dear God, there was some court that
did not recognize this defense, but simply wrote down everything
as it happened; that did not look into my heart, but simply
noted the swastika armband? Before that court I was in a wretched
position. Dear God, where had I gone wrong? What should I say
to the judge who asked, 'You wear a swastika armband and say
that you do not want to. Then why do you wear it?'"
Nazi propaganda, policies and terror had broken down
traditional support-networks. You couldn't be sure whom to trust.
Everyone could be on the government payroll, or could turn into
informants to save their skins. And so arms went out in Nazi
salutes, militarist songs were sung at rallies and on the streets,
"each one of us the Gestapo of the others." In fear,
individualism was crushed, leaving most citizens to relate only
to The Leader, or to their military units, the comradeship offered
by fascism.
Millions of Marks for a Loaf of Bread
Then there was the economic factor, the terror associated
with having no money with which to live. One reads Haffner's
description of the hyper-inflation crisis, but it's difficult
to accept or understand: "No other nation has experienced
anything comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations
went through the Great War, and most of them have also experienced
revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistributions of wealth,
and currency devaluation. None but Germany has undergone the
fantastic, grotesque extreme of all of these together; none
has experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending,
bloody Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards
lost their value.
"...Anyone who had savings in a bank or bonds saw
their value disappear overnight. Soon it did not matter whether
it was a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything
was obliterated...A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost
fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary
of sixty-five thousand marks brought home the previous Friday
was no longer sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday...In
August, the dollar reached a million [marks]....In September,
a million marks no longer had any practical value...At the end
of October, it was a billion...The atmosphere became revolutionary
once again."
When citizens face uncertainty on this scale -- and the
fear and dislocation that attend all such social traumas --
a man on a white horse promising to restore order has great
appeal, even to some staunch democrats.
There were other ingredients that went into the bubbling
fascist vat: the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty
that were placed on defeated Germany after World War I; the
unceasing propaganda barrage in the mass media, helping citizens
to agree with the government; the martial mentality that pervaded
society. ("From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys
daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game
between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional
satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that is where
[Nazism] draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to
the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance
and its cruelty toward internal opponents...Ultimately, that
is also the source of Nazism's belligerant attitude toward neighboring
states. Other countries are not regarded as neighbors, but must
be opponents, whether they like it or not."
And then there is the inexplicable mystique that surrounds
such men as Hitler, that mesmerizes and lures millions into
their web. "If my experience of Germany has taught me anything,
it is this: Rathenau [who led a progressive government in 1921-22,
and was then assassinated by anti-Semitic thugs] and Hitler
are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses
to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by
his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from
inaccessible regions, from sort of 'beyond.' the one from a
sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millenia
and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle
far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls,
from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench
of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines,
and the hangman's yard. From their respective 'beyonds,' they
both drew a spellbinding power, quite irrespective of their
politics."
When Hitler's in-your-face brand of "beyond"
power -- with its meanness and arrogance and menace, throwing
opponents in jail, beating them, even killing them -- met the
traditional democratic culture, those on the other end often
had no tools at their disposal to combat the new hardball politics:
"It was then that the real mystery of the Hitler phenomenon
began to show itself: the strange befuddlement and numbness
of his opponents, who could not cope with his behavior and found
themselves transfixed by the gaze of the basilisk, unable to
see that it was hell personified that challenged them."
The Big Lie Technique
And how did Haffner deal for so long with this menacing
force in front of him? "What saved me was...my nose. I
have a fairly well developed figurative sense of smell, or to
put it differently, a sense of the worth (or worthlessness!)
of human, moral, political views and attitudes. Most Germans
unfortunately lack this sense almost completely. The cleverest
of them are capable of discussing themselves stupid with their
abstractions and deductions, when just using their noses would
tell them that something stinks."
Given their built-in weakness and their willingness to
swallow the most outrageous Big Lies emanating from the propaganda
ministry and the media, most Germans were fruit waiting to be
plucked by the Nazi harvesters. "They still fall for anything.
After all that, I do not see that one can blame the majority
of Germans who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was
the work of the Communists. [The Parliament burned down and
a convenient Communist arsonist was fingered, which the Nazis
used as the excuse to unleash police-state tactics against all
opponents.] What one can blame them for, and what shows their
terrible collective weakness of character clearly for the first
time during the Nazi period, is that this settled the matter.
With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that,
as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal
freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution; as though
it followed as a necessary consequence."
In short, what should have been a strong political and
moral opposition movement to Hitlerian policies, meekly acceded
to the destruction of their country's institutions of law and
social harmony. The result in society was a clear leaning toward
the dynamic, muscular policies advocated by the Nazis, and a
seething "anger and disgust with the cowardly treachery
of their own [opposition] leadership."
Of course, fear of police-state action always was operative.
"Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was
a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism
of the masses. Many also felt a need for revenge against those
who had abandoned them. Then there was a peculiarly German line
of thought: 'All the predictions of the opponents of the Nazis
have not come true. They said the Nazis could not win. Now they
have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must
be right.' There was also (particularly among intellectuals)
the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party
by becoming a member, even now shift its direction."
All of this follows the normal range of psychology, Haffner
says. "The only thing that is missing is what in animals
is called 'breeding.' This is a solid inner kernel that cannot
be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble
and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to be
drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans.
As a nation they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone.
That was shown in March 1933. At the moment of truth, when other
nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively
and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered
a nervous breakdown. The result of this millionfold nervous
breakdown is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is
today the nightmare of the rest of the world."
Haffner laments that the crimes of the Hitler administration,
given this collective nervous breakdown, have very little impact
on the population, which seems to accept everything done in
its name with a shrug of the shoulders. "It is one of the
uncanny aspects of events in Germany that the deeds have no
doers, the suffering has no martyrs. Everything takes place
under a kind of anesthesia. Objectively dreadful deeds produce
a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like
schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like
minor incidents. Even death under torture only produces the
response 'Bad luck'."
The Slide Toward Fascism
And so it becomes easier to simply permit oneself
to sink, ever so slowly into this collective illness, into accommodation
with the ruling party, even though the police-state is constantly
violating citizens' privacy. "We were pursued into the
farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life
there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it
would end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender,
but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil -- and you
were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were
one of the victorious hunters."
Certainly, Haffner and others like him felt their own
slide toward complicity with the Nazis, as their sense of self
faded. "Things were quite deliberately arranged so that
the individual had no room to maneuver. What one represented,
what one's opinions were in 'private' and 'actually,' were of
no concern and set aside, put on ice, as it were. On the other
hand, in moments when one had the leisure to think of one's
individuality...one had the feeling that what was actually happening,
in which one participated mechanically, had no real existence
or validity. It was only in these hours that one could attempt
to call oneself morally to account and prepare a last position
of defense for one's inner self."
Haffner was approaching decision time about his future
if he stayed in the Third Reich. But it's clear which way he
was leaning, as his analyses got darker and darker. "It
is said that the Germans are subjugated. That is only half true.
They are also something else, something worse, for which there
is no word: they are 'comraded,' a dreadfully dangerous condition.
They are under a spell. They live a drugged life in a dream
world. They are terribly happy, but terribly demeaned; so self-satisifed,
but so boundlessly loathsome; so proud and yet so despicable
and inhuman. They think they are scaling high mountains, when
in reality they are crawling through a swamp. As long as the
spell lasts, there is almost no antidote."
He hung in until 1938. Just prior to the Second World
War, Haffner left Germany for England to join the war-effort
against fascism. He did not return until the mid-'50s.
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So, dear reader, examine the above descriptive passages
from the Germany of the 1930s, when the Nazis were assuming
full power, and see what lessons can be learned for our situation
today.
As I write this, Ashcroft is telling the Congress that
the Patriot Act -- the same act that more than 100 cities have
voted not to honor because of its numerous violations of rights
guaranteed by the Constitution -- does not give the Bush Administration
enough police power and needs to be expanded. (This at a time
when American citizens have been arrested, not charged and then
stashed away on military bases, cut off from judicial protections;
and hundreds of foreign prisoners are being held by the U.S.
military at Guantanamo in violation of both the U.S. Constitution
and the Geneva conventions.)
Demonstrable government falsehoods are being published
by a compliant media, while that same media, owned by corporate
giants, refuses to report factual information that is embarrassing
to the Administration. And finally, the Pentagon is working
on "contingency plans" for the next unilateral invasion
of a sovereign state by the U.S. military.
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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught American government
and international relations at various universities. Formerly
a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly
20 years, he now co-edits The
Crisis Papers.
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