Hitler, Trump and the "Revolution Against Reason"

The historian Christopher R. Browning (at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has a revealing and terrifying essay in New York Review of Books about Hitler’s quick ascend to power in the first half of 1933. In a review of three books about the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, Browning brings forward many similarities to to today’s world, in particular the U.S. Many things that looks like Trumpian weirdness and anomalies echoes of the 1930s.

Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days starts with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30. Fritzsche notes that there “was no such thing as majority opinion” in fragmented Germany and that the “political system had checkmated itself.” … He continues, “In order to smash the Weimar Republic the men in the room needed the Nazis, and to lever themselves into power, the Nazis needed the men in the room.”

And as we see Trump’s fanatics prepare for a second January 6, we should remember that the “Nazis had no intention of competing in a free and fair election.”

Fritzsche makes the telling argument that violence not only silenced Nazi opponents but was also essential to building support. The ongoing violence, choreographed as public rituals of humiliation that portrayed Nazi opponents as weak and ridiculous, turned entertained spectators into accomplices by virtue of their “voyeuristic pleasure.” The “wave of denunciation” that swept over Germany broadened the ranks of complicity further.

And as the Germans watched the violence, they changed.

Fritzsche asks how such a “sea change,” in which “more and more Germans” accepted the “necessity of compliance” as well as the Nazi standard of “normality,” was possible. Coercion “played an undeniable role,” he concedes, but ultimately he concludes that “the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life,” and that “to make Germany great was to narrate a great awakening.”

Browning quotes Benjamin Carter Hett’s book The Death of Democracy:

“in many ways, our time more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s,” as the Nazis “were fundamentally a protest reaction against globalization.”

To build the German MAGA movement, truth has to be overcome and replaced by the submission to the Great Leader, the Fuhrer.

The lost war, revolution, unjust peace settlement, economic chaos, and “huge social and technological change” were so intolerable that they led to a rejection of reality by many Germans. And they supported Hitler because he gave “voice to this flight from reality as could no other German politician of his time.” This “hostility to reality translated into contempt for politics” that in turn destroyed the “minimal common ground” that democracy needs to function.

Like Donald Trump, Hitler lied all the time, while revealing his plans to an audience that had stopped reflecting. Truth didn’t matter.

For Hitler his message “had to be simple” and “emotional,” not intellectual. And while he was personally close to no one, he had “a remarkable intuition for the thoughts, hopes, fears, and needs of other people.” Among other traits of Hitler, Hett includes insecurity, intolerance of criticism, bombastic claims about his own achievements, and scorn for intellectuals and experts. Thus without ever mentioning Donald Trump and MAGA, Hett clearly intends to draw parallels between Hitler and the Nazis on the one hand and the current American situation on the other.

And if you are surprised that so many billionaires, powerful and conservative joined forces with a right-wing “national socialist,” you are following in the path of Germany’s conservatives.

Like Ryback and Fritzsche, Hett places ultimate responsibility for Hitler’s ascent on German conservatives, who disdained democracy:

The crisis and the deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation…. To this end, a succession of conservative politicians…courted the Nazis as the only way to retain power on terms congenial to them. Hitler’s regime was the result.

Execution in North Korea: Remember Lin Biao, and the Gang of Four

Kim Jong-un had his uncle shot by a firing squad using a machine gun. It is bizarre, but probably something Machiavelli would have recommended as quartering doesn't seem to be an option in North Korea. The strange (it actually makes Game of Thrones seem normal) but interesting thing about the way Jang Song-thaek was ousted is that it was made public, and that publicity will undermine the legitimacy not only of young Kim's rule, but of the entire system, not unlike how the official revelations about the fall of Mao's designated successor Lin Biao, and then the "Gang of Four's" palace intrigues broke the spell of infallibility surrounding the Communist Party leadership. New York Times reports:

“Although high-ranking leaders, including members of the Kim family, have been deposed before, we haven’t seen anything this public or dramatic since Kim Jong-un’s grandfather Kim Il-sung purged his last major rivals in the late 1950s,” said Prof. Charles K. Armstrong, a North Korea expert at Columbia University in New York and the author of “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”

Some of the analysts quoted in the New York Times piece see this as an end of their dreams of economic reforms. I rather think this is the beginning. Either Kim Jong-un will introduce reforms as a way to buy back some of the legitimacy he has squandered, or he will be the next guy executed, and then the new leaders will have to push reforms to mark a break with the miserable tyranny.


Execution Raises Doubts About Kim’s Grip on North Korea (December 13, 2013)

North Korea Releases List of Accusations Against Purged Official (December 8, 2013)

North Korea’s Leader Is Said to Oust Uncle in Power Play (December 3, 2013)

CNN on the execution of Kim's uncle

Ex-Dissients Addresses Chen Guangcheng

Wei Jingsheng: Don’t Believe China’s Promises
Wang Dan: Mr. Chen, Welcome to America

A Chinese professor and friend told me during my first trip to China back in 1985 that China's leaders don't believe in any "higher being," so they have no one to answer to. I'm not religious, and I don't think my friend was either, but I think he was right about the potential of a religious belief to restrain power. It doesn't have to be that way - much evil has been done in the name of one god or another - but it often is. My friend was thinking of Mao Zedong, but his successors were as committed to their cause - economic modernization and national power - as Mao was his revolutionary zeal.

Wei Jingsheng raised the question of political freedom to Deng Xiaoping, and that was enough for him to be locked up for 15 years. China has changed a lot since I met the professor on that rooftop bar in Chengdu (I am not mentioning his name even though he has passed away, since family members can be targeted too), but no fundamental political has happened since then. Wei and was right in 1979, and he is right now.

Nicholas D. Kristof on Chen Guangcheng

Democracy, Dictatorship and Economic Growth

It's a popular notion that dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, and that it is China's political system that explains it's fast growth since 1978. Professor Yasheng Huang from MIT Sloan School of Management challenges that notion, by a series of very interesting comparisons.

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth?

If you found Yasheng's speech interesting, you may also want to listen to Joseph Nye's speech, which places China's economic and political power in a soft power perspective.