"An Adventure Whose Ending Cannot Be Foreseen"

American Samizdat: The Coming Tyranny

Tyranny: artist unknown.

The purpose of a good, well-applied analogy is to elucidate. It is to deepen the understanding of one, less familiar figure by holding it up in the comparison that constructs the analogy beside another, better known figure. The analogizer says, “Here, look, see this one — these several — these many points of comparison between the two figures, how they are similar to each other? Let us understand better this new, less well-known phenomenon by recognizing how it is composed of elements not unlike those we find in a phenomenon we know far better.”

The purpose of a good analogy is not to claim that one thing is identical to another — the very same. That is never the case. Aside from the things themselves, the conditions in which we find them — time, space, circumstance, history, culture — will always distinguish them, from which outcomes will, to varying degrees, vary. To begin most basically, a German autocrat will surely speak a different native and everyday language from an American autocrat.

The language of autocracy, however, the vicious and violent vernacular of the passion-inflaming demagogue, is the same across time, space, and history. Our task — to hear its rumble amid the din of the everyday babel.

In truth, far from the dismissive, even derisive denials of those always reluctant to stake a bold claim in the open field of the present in order to foresee the future’s terrain, analogies of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler are probably the closest and most useful of any to be offered between Trump and the many tyrants of the past one hundred years.

Despotism: artist unknown.

Oh, those of moderate temperament will snort with patronizing gaze down over the pinched lenses of an analytical pince-nez — one loses all credibility with such “hysteria.” Trump is not another Hitler. (Indeed, there was only one Adolf.) Nazism, world conquest, the Holocaust were incomparable world-historic events — one of a kind, a perfect storm, the GOAT of calamities, we will not see its like again; Hitler doubled down on a rising tide, it can’t happen here, the institutions are too strong, Americans are a good people — and the cliches tumble into view like great skeletal balls of weed whisking over the streets of a thinking person’s ghost town.

The [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 30, 1933

Hitler Selected as Chancellor in Divided Cabinet

Adolf Hitler today was named Chancellor of Germany and the Republic has entered upon an adventure whose ending cannot be foreseen.

Hitler, 43-year-old chief of the National Socialists or Nazis, is not dictator of Germany and insofar his dream has not come true.

. . . .

Hitler's energy is simply colossal; he is the hardest working politician in Europe. His capacity for traveling and speechmaking -- he can talk, hour after hour to a crowd which he has managed to lay hold of and will not let go -- is unrivaled in the contemporary world.

. . . .

His importance does not lie in anything he says, but in the fact that he has managed to organize and capitalize on all of the many sorts of dissatisfaction that honeycomb contemporary Germany.

. . . .

From time to time he has declared his intention of repudiating the Versailles Treaty, the reparations, and all other "unjust burdens" which the Allies place upon his country.

"Heads will roll!" he shouted in one speech, and the slogan has echoed through many campaigns. Lately, however, there have been indications of moderation.

~ ~ ~

The Cleveland Press, January 30, 1933

Hindenburg Names Hitler Chancellor after Compromise

. . . .

U.S. Unruffled by Hitler Rise

[S]everal authorities indicated they had faith that Hitler would act with moderation compared to the extremist agitation on his recent election campaigning much of which was regarded outside Germany as highly "inflamatory."

. . . .

But many authorities here believed his acquisition of power might be better for Germany and for Europe that the alleged menace of his shadow constantly hovering near power as it has for two years. Experts based this belief on past events showing that so-called "radical" groups usually moderated, once in power.

~ ~ ~

The [Chicago] Daily Jewish Courier, February 6, 1933

Race Fanaticism and Anti-Semitism

. . . .

An Adolf Hitler proudly proclaims, "A people of pure race, conscious of its blood, will never be enslaved by the Jew." This statement is just as characteristic of the blind nationalism and race fanaticism of the Hitler movement, as it is in opposition to reason...

But, the worst of it is that the masses give credence to such madness, and in times of chaos as today, place more trust in such perversions than in religion and logic or in the ideals of religion -- humanity and the rapprochement of peoples.

~ ~ ~

The Cleveland Press, March 25, 1933

Nazis Round Up Jews, Emigres Since the War

. . . .

Police in the Palatinate (Rhenish Bavaria) have ordered all Jews who migrated there after 1914 to report to police headquarters,

. . . .

Hermann Goering, Chancellor Adolph Hitler's chief aid, appealed to the press today for fairness in reports on conditions in Germany.

. . . .

He said neither the Reich nor the Prussian government intended to pass discriminatory laws, and never would allow a person to be persecuted because he is a Jew.

The world should recognize, Goering said, that Germany stemmed the Communist deluge and saved Occidental culture...

~ ~ ~

The Cleveland Press, March 25, 1933

The Week in World Affairs

by F. H. Sterbenz

. . . .

The German government, however, denounced the reports as being false, said Germany is quiet, prepared to take action against correspondents.

~ ~ ~

The [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, March 27, 1933

Germany Moves To Halt Rumors

. . . .

Konstantin von Neurath, German Foreign Minister: . . . . "The recent national revolution in Germany, which aims at stamping out the Communist danger and cleaning the public life of Marxist elements, has proceeded with exemplary order. Case of disorderly conduct have been remarkably few and trifling."Hundred of thousands of Jews carry on their lives throughout Germany as usual...

~ ~ ~

The Cleveland Press, March 27, 1933

U.S. Finds Nazis Virtually End Mistreating German Jews

The American embassy in Berlin reports that physical mistreatment of Jews in Germany has been "virtually terminated."

The report was summarized by Secretary of State Hull in a letter to two Jewish leaders, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York City and Cyrus Adler of Philadelphia.

~ ~ ~

The [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, March 27, 1933

The American government will not protest the mistreatment of Jews in Germany in as much as official reports indicated this has stopped.

The purpose of this highly limited selection of news reports from Hitler’s first 60 days as German Chancellor — long before Hitler became “Hitler” and beyond comparison — is to reflect just some few repetitive habits of mind in thinking about tyrants while they are still in the making, in their already boldly declared but still developmental stage of becoming, habits we have seen on display in the United States contending with Trump, including an eagerness not to believe what is before one’s eyes. The selection ends fewer than 60 days into Hitler’s reign, fewer than 30 since the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed The Enabling Act, which granted Hitler dictatorial power — to save the nation, you understand — for four years — it was limited, temporary, you understand, a termination point Hitler did not observe.

Because of structural impediments, I do not anticipate that Trump will consolidate absolute power with anything like that alacrity, but it will not be for whatever effort he can put forth toward that end or in obliviousness to a stated desire to be dictator “only” on “day one”: because, you know.

As it happened, the November 7 issue of the New York Review of Books offered historian Christopher R. Browning reviewing three books on Adolf Hitler’s rise: titled “Hitler’s Enablers,” the essay considers Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, by Timothy W. Ryback; Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche; and The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, by Benjamin Carter Hett.

Browning begins:

Historians usually try to maintain two vantage points at the same time. They attempt to perceive and recreate events as contemporaries experienced them. They also utilize the advantages of hindsight and access to a wide array of documentation to try to explain events in a way that contemporaries never could. Sometimes historians also draw upon their knowledge of the past to enhance the understanding of our current situation.

As Americans stand on a second or third precipice of what seems a fall already in progress, we read,

The tragic weight of Hitler’s dictatorship on history has lent a sense of inevitability to his coming to power. How could the origins of a regime that was so catastrophic in its consequences have been so contingent? How could the casual decisions of a few feckless men have had such terrible results?

Has the U.S. not not-enjoyed more than a few feckless men and some women this past decade?

As Goebbels wrote in 1928, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”

Has the U.S. political system and its political culture not seemed to us all these many years now “deadlocked” —that is, dysfunctional, frozen before the critical, fundamental task of supporting the lives of its citizens?

Fritzsche notes that there “was no such thing as majority opinion” in fragmented Germany and that the “political system had checkmated itself.” Thus the fate of the country lay in the hands of a small clique of right-wingers around Hindenburg, who were determined not only to exclude the left (the revolutionary Communists as well as the ardently prodemocratic Social Democrats) but also to “destroy the republic and establish a dictatorship.”

Well, the German people in 1932-33 were tired of it, too.

Whatever the false calculations of Hitler’s partners, his appointment as Weimar’s twenty-third chancellor was felt to be “different” from previous transitions, according to Fritzsche, and the Nazis benefited enormously from the yearning of millions of Germans for “a new start” after years of crisis and deadlock.

After the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, “in the palpably unfree elections of March 5, the Nazis won only 44 percent of the popular vote. Their coalition partners garnered another 8 percent, giving the government a thin 52 percent majority.”

Despite the closing grip on power, so quickly, still, 48% of the German people had not voted for Hitler or his allies.

The challenge Fritzsche sets himself is to explain how the Nazi regime managed “to erode” so much of this silenced 48 percent within the next two months. If repression—always cast as counterterror against the Communist threat and necessary to preserve law and order—could neutralize opposition within five weeks, it nevertheless continued unabated thereafter. The new regime needed several more months to obtain willing identification with and consent from a significant majority of Germans.

. . . .

Simultaneously, the “‘48 percent’ who had not voted for Hitler almost entirely disappeared from view” as they increasingly seemed “obsolescent” even to themselves. [Emphasis added]

Benjamin Carter Hett, in The Death of Democracy, according to Browning, tells us that “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.”

Browning summarizes Hett’s account of the German narrative like this:

[Germans] entered World War I in August 1914 experiencing transcendent unity but . . . their defeat in November 1918 was the result of a “stab in the back” perpetrated by Jews, Marxists, and internationalists. 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.

Hett then turns to what he calls the Hitler paradox: “Adolf Hitler lied all the time. Yet he also said clearly what he was doing and what he planned to do.” As his finance minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, observed, “he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth.” But his followers craved “authenticity,” and “facts didn’t matter at all.” 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.

As the disappearance of the “48 percent” and the following, right out of 2024 American pollster demographics, make clear, “Hitler” – like “Trump” – was not inevitable.

Hett notes how dramatically the center of political gravity in Germany shifted between the presidential elections of 1925 and 1932: “The patterns of support in the 1925 election had been completely reversed…. The best statistical predictor of a vote for Hitler in 1932 was a vote for Hindenburg in 1925.” I think it should be noted that in addition to taking the bulk of the Protestant middle-class vote that previously went to the DDP, DVP, and DVNP, the Nazis were overwhelmingly successful in capturing first-time voters, especially youth, and were also disproportionately successful among women voters.⁸

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.

Trump and the Trumpists have been showing and telling us what he is and what he wants to become all along. The fullest moon you ever saw has been growing in the darkest American political night you never imagined, filling the sky, and too many want to fool themselves it’s just the morning sun.

Before it is too late, do not be quiet — do not seek, simply, to go on, to get by, merely to survive.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the democratic light.

AJA