Obama on Trump and the Radical Republicans, 2018

Barack Obama's speech this past Friday was an important one, Former President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the ‘state of our democracy’ 09/07/2018 (Obama's speech begins around 8:04 in this video):

USA Today provides the full transcript (Read transcript of former President Obama's speech, blasting President Trump 09/07/2018)

It's an important speech because he is the former President and because he is such a widely respected figure within the Democratic Party and beyond. And because he explicitly condemns Trump and today's Republican Party for what they are, radical threats to liberal democracy. This struck me as an especially important clarifying moment:

We're supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we're sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

This was also an important, quotable statement, "over the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party."

And he elaborated:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outsized influence over our politics; systemically attacked voting rights to make it harder for the young people, the minorities, and the poor to vote.

Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could. Cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans. Embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

Rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America's debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic President. None of this is conservative. I don't mean to pretend I'm channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that's not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party.

It's not conservative. It sure isn't normal. It's radical. It's a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters, even when it hurts the country. It's a vision that says the few who can afford a high-priced lobbyist and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

And, yes, it's in the video and the transcript:

The point [George] Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class. [my emphasis]

Don't expect to hear that phrase "ruling class" from Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer! Obama even said that NOT having such a "permanent ruling class" is "essential to American democracy."

I'm also going to take a deep breath here and say I like Obama's image of American history. If you were discussing it with him in an academic forum, he would probably agree that what he is doing in a speech like that is presenting a narrative of American history that highlights the development of democracy and human rights.

I wish I could say that was a cliche narrative. But these days, it's not really. Because the Democratic Party is unwilling to defend its own Democratic (and democratic) symbolism prior to 1860. And on the left and center-left, the Whig narrative in which monarchist Alexander Hamilton and plutoratic-minded John Quincy Adams are the heroes of democracy has become dominant at the expense of other democratic traditions in early and antebellum American history.

That is partially because the left and center-left are very aware of the disgraceful histories of slavery and the Indian Wars, and that's a good and necessary thing. As time pushes forward, it becomes harder for Americans to look at the pre-Civil War United States and see something familiar. And most Democrats are too timid to express any admiration for the guerrilla fighter ("terrorist!") John Brown, who is the only well-known white public figure prior to the Civil War who had attitudes toward equal rights for blacks and women that were pretty much like those considered democratic norms now.

But Obama described the development of democracy by holding up the slave-owner and Indian-fighter George Washington as quoted above as an example of responsible democratic governance and leadership and an opponent of a "ruling class". And quoted the slaveowner and Indian-fighter Thomas Jefferson (though not by name) in the Delaration of Independence, invoking the American Revolution as an important democratic development that should still inform and and inspire defenders of democracy today.

This is a sensible way of looking at democratic history, both in terms of political symbolism and historical analysis. And it's the kind of framing that the Democratic Party needs to use on a wider scale. Leaving the symbolism of the Revolution and the Constitution to be mangled by the Republicans is just nuts. (Trump's thing about Andrew Jackson being a prime example.)

As Charlie Pierce wrote of the speech in his appreciative analysis of it, "Yes, toward the end he got back into how there are people of good will on both sides who are drowned out by the noise of our politics. Low, high, you know the spiel." And he explained, "He could say nothing else because that hope is his entire political raison d'être. This is the way it is with Barack Obama."

This doesn't mean that I didn't have to resist the urge to bite my arm several times listening the long speech.

Because Obama steps on his own better messages when he starts singing the praise of Bipartisanship and "common ground". Even though he included in this speech an excellent description of the real existing Republican Party's version of the kind of bipartisanship they will accept:

And that doesn't mean, by the way, abandoning our principles or caving to bad policy in the interests of maintaining some phony version of "civility." That seems to be, by the way, the definition of civility offered by too many Republicans: We will be polite as long as we get a hundred percent of what we want and you don't call us out on the various ways that we're sticking it to people. And we'll click our tongues and issue vague statements of disappointment when the President does something outrageous, but we won't actually do anything about it. That's not civility. That's abdicating your responsibilities.

Although the fighting passages will get more play in the media, and I'm happy about that, most of his talk about "common ground" steps on or even contradicts those fighting messages. Because that passage just quoted is the reason that his Presidential model of Bipartisanship and Grand Bargains was such a flat-out failure. No, that doesn't mean his whole Administration was failure. It means that his no-red-America-no-blue-America paradigm isn't founded in reality.

In that connection, this passage for me was a real WTF moment:

So if you don't like what's going on right now – and you shouldn't – do not complain. Don't hashtag. Don't get anxious. Don't retreat. Don't binge on whatever it is you're bingeing on. Don't lose yourself in ironic detachment. Don't put your head in the sand. Don't boo. Vote.

Don't boo?!? I get his point that without mobilizing votes, those things in themselves won't change government in the way that is needed. Do not complain? Do not hashtag? Please. I know he's making a standard community-organizer motivational appeal here to focus his audience on taking the action he's advocating. But that doesn't just step on but stomps on the activist message he tries to convey in other parts of the speech.

It will be a great day when Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer can give a speech like that without mentioning the word "deficit." Obama rightly called out the Republicans' hypocrisy on deficit spending and deficit taxing. Republican politicians don't care about the deficit and neither do their voters. The thing is, nobody cares about the deficit outside of the mainstream talking heads who appears on Morning Joe and economists who are more concerned about professional respectability that actual public policy in the real world.

Also, yes, Obama is Obama, so he's always going to say things like this:

And it also means appreciating that progress does not happen all at once, but when you put your shoulder to the wheel, if you're willing to fight for it, things do get better. And let me tell you something, particularly young people here. Better is good. I used to have to tell my young staff this all the time in the White House. Better is good. That's the history of progress in this country. Not perfect. Better. The Civil Rights Act didn't end racism, but it made things better. Social Security didn't eliminate all poverty for seniors, but it made things better for millions of people.

Do not let people tell you the fight's not worth it because you won't get everything that you want. The idea that, well, you know there's racism in America so I'm not going to bother voting. No point. That makes no sense. You can make it better. Better's always worth fighting for. [my emphasis]

There no point in trying to quibble about the specific words there, because they are on an abstract level not connected to pending controversies. Here the tone is the important thing, the idea being that anyone who suggests that a compromise might be a bad one or that right now is not the time to surrender to the opposition is a naif who doesn't understand the Real World. This is his way of poo-pooing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

But, gosh, look at this! Another passage that got a lot of coverage says:

So Democrats aren't just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they're running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate debt-free. [my emphasis]

He didn't go so far as to say he endorses Medicare For All or free college. But he's only talking about them because progressives like Bernie Sanders pushed for them, campaigned on them, and exposed the ideas to a wide enough public that they became popular with a signiicant number of voters.

If your a strict political careerist, platitudes like "better is good" or "better's always worth fighting for" are useful excuses. But they are unlikely to inspire militant commitment to ideas that aren't already widely accepted.

I won't go into detail here, but Obama's political legacy also needs to be carefully evaluated in understanding why we wound up with the Orange Clown in the White House backed in his destructive policies by a fanaticized Republican Party. A good starting point would be the Grand Bargain he made a centerpiece of his Prsidential strategy. It involved repeated attempts by Obama himself to convince Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. That was not a strategy of better is good. It was very much a position of worse is better.

The conservative Heinrich Brüning (German Chancellor 1930–32) was better than Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. The reactionary Paul von Hindenburg was better than Adolf Hitler as President. Which is why the Social Democratic Party supported Hindurburg in the final round of the 1932 election over Hitler. But Brüning's disastrous Herbert Hoover economic policies had a great deal to do with Hitler's becoming Chancellor in January 1933. A position for which President Hindenburg accepted him.

In thoses cases, better was not good enough.

Very importantly, Obama's Administration had a solemn obligation under the Torture Convention to seriously legally investigate and prosecute the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration. They didn't. Giving that kind of de facto immunity to Presidential crimes has the problem I described in a post in 2008 (Why the Obama Justice Department has to prosecute the torture perpetrators 11/25/2008):

It's precisely because the Cheney-Bush administration broke the law extensively while preserving the basic governmental structure that makes prosecutions even more necessary in our present case. What's the point in having a rule of law if the Executive can arbitrarily set it aside? And what's the deterrence for the next set of Cheneys and Roves if there are no legal consequences for the criminal acts of the current administration?

Cheney and Bush created a real-life template for who an American government can use an authoritarian political party to establish a truly lawless Presidential government. The next set of Roves and Cheneys that come to power need to think that if they are ordered to implement similar lawless actions, that the law may very well catch up to them.

If the guilty participants in this administration don't experience direct legal consequences, i.e., prosecution and legal punishment, for what they did, then the Cheney authoritarian model has worked. Next time around, it's just a matter of finding the right combination of voter suppression, fear, de facto control of the media and suppression of real dissent to make it permanent.

Cheney's idea of democracy was articulated back in 1949 by East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht, as he explained to his Party comrades in 1949 what kind of government they were founding in the new "German Democratic Republic": "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)

Not prosecuting known major crimes from this [Cheney-Bush] administration would validate the Cheney-Ulbricht approach to governance. And that would definitely not be a good thing.

Because, as Dark Lord Cheney himself said at a reception in Poland for Auschwitz survivors in 2006,, presumably with no irony intended, "Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." (Vice President's Remarks at Reception for Survivors of Auschwitz George W. Bush White House Archives 01/26/2005)

A brief but well-done cartoon version of how Hitler became Chancellor of Germany 1933

How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard TED-Ed 07/18/2016

For a five-minute video, this is remarkably good. It gets the Versailles Treaty, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and the Great Depression into the story, frames anti-Semitism in an accurate way, and presents Hitler as a skilled politician, which he was - very much to the detriment of the whole world including Germany.

I'm particularly impressed that it avoids completely one of my pet peeves in the accounts of Hitler's rise to power, the claim that the hyperinflation of 1923-24 led to Hitler seizing power in 1933. That argument only works if you pretty much ignore the Great Depression, which hit Germany very hard, the actual voting results from 1924-32, and the issues on which the Nazi Party campaigned. The Nazis did use parliamentary methods supplemented by street violence to come to power.

But their biggest vote total in clean elections came in summer 1932, after several years of Herbert-Hooverish economic polices that made the Depression much worse. And their vote total dropped in a second parliamentary election in 1932. There was another vote just after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 which was semi-free at best. And even then the Nazis failed to get a majority.

There's a history that is a classic from 1938 but is still a valuable sources on the politics of the Nazis takeover, Why Hitler Came Into Power by Theodore Abel.

Sources for Hitler's racial theories in Mein Kampf

A new critical edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf has been published this month in Germany. It's the first edition allowed to be published legally there after the expiration of the postwar ban on its publication. (Alison Smale, Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ New York Times 12/01/2015; "Mein Kampf". Hitlers Buch wird neu aufgelegt Focus Online 04.01.2016)

This has occasioned new research into the book and its significance. One example is Roman Töppel's
"„Volk und Rasse“. Hitlers Quellen auf der Spur" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64:1 (2016). Töppel investigates the likely sources of the racial ideas elaborated in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter of Mein Kampf. And he gives every evidence of having approached the task with stereotypical German thoroughness.

In the process, he finds that the following are the most likely influences on the racial ideas in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter.

• Paul Bang (1879–1945), author of Judas Schuldbuch. Eine deutsche Abrechnung (1919)
• Erwin Baur (1875–1933)
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), one of the better-known anti-Semitic racial ideologues, author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911)
• Heinrich Claß (1868–1953), author of Wenn ich der Kaiser wär(1912)
• Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), who was an ideological mentor for Hitler in Munich, an early editor of the Völkischen Beobachter and author of Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (published 1927)
• Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), author of Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1920)
• Eugen Fischer (1874–1967)
• Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), author of Handbuch der Judenfrage (1907)
• Otto Hauser (1876–1944), author of Geschichte des Judentums (1921)
• Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), author of Rembrandt als Erzieher (1906)
• Fritz Lenz (1887–1976)
• Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), longtime editor of the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter
• Richard Wagner (1813-1833), the brilliant but notoriously anti-Semitic composer, author of "Das Judenthum in der Musik“ ("Judaism in Music") (1850)

Yes, it's a real rogues' gallery.

Baur, Fischer and Lenz were all three geneticists, who published a 1923 study called, "Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene“ ("Outline of human hereditary tenets and racial hygiene"). They promoted such ideas as the notion that the less valuable races breed more prolifically than the more valuable ones, a notion that White Power politicians like Pat Buchanan still promote. They also advocated the idea that "true genius" was inherited and never the result of upbringing and education. That concept will be all too familiar to anyone who has listened to the tedious "heredity vs. upbringing" assertions typically of white racists in America. I learned long ago that when someone poses the rhetorical question "What's more important, inheritance or upbringing?" that you're about two sentences away from a lesson on how "us white folks sure are smarter than them blacks."

Dietrick Eckart (1868-1923), one of the nasty characters who influenced Hitler's racial propaganda in Mein Kampf

That's part of the reason I have to admire someone who can wade through this gutter literature and then write about it coherently and professionally. Because that's mostly what Hitler scooped up into his writing and speeches. There's no doubt that Hitler was shrewd and extremely talented as a politician. But his literary talents were not marked by brilliance. What he provided in Mein Kampf was a propagandist recycling of the anti-Semitic and radical right nationalist idea that he absorbed particularly in prewar Vienna and postwar Munich.

And as Töppel emphasizes repeatedly, it's not easy to track exactly which influences were most important for Hitler at the time he wrote Mein Kampf. Hitler's own claims are unreliable. He claimed, for instance, that all during his service in the German Army during the First World War, he carried around the five volume of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea in his backpack. But Töppel explains that there is little evidence that Hitler had much if any direct acquaintance with the 19th-century philosopher's work. And that he probably learned much of what he did know of him before writing Mein Kampf was through Dietrich Eckart.

Töppel argues that the scholarship on Hitler's racial ideology has tended to overestimate the influence of several mostly unsavory characters: "geopolitical" theorist Karl Haushofer (1869-1946),; the American segregationist Madison Grant (1865-1937), at least not for the "Volk und Rasse" chapter; French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936); Joseph Adolf Lanz, aka, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), leader of a small Austrian esoteric racist religious sect he called the New Templar Order; and, Viennese occultist Guido von List (1848-1919). The groups of Lanz von Lebenfels and of List used the swastika as a favorite symbol; the swastika was adopted more widely by German-nationalist groups in Austria in the years before the First World War. As Brigitte Hamann notes in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Ditators (1996), there is some evidence that Hitler may have been particularly impressed by List's valuation of the swastika as a Germanic symbol.

Töppel also rejects the idea that the novelist Karl May, who wrote cowboy-and-Indian stories set in the American Old West, was any significant influence on Hitler's racial ideology. Hitler's own claim to have read many Karl May novels as a child is totally credible. Because Karl May was incredibly popular among young German and Austria readers. To this day, any German or Austrian under 50 or so probably grew up reading Karl May stories. And those younger are familiar with him through the TV and movies based on his tales, like those of his American Indian character Winnetou.

Töppel stresses that Hitler was highly selective in the ideas he drew from his sources. He took the ones that fit the framework of his notion of the superior "Aryan" race whose most important enemy was the Jewish race. Töppel cites several instances in which sources important for him on some points explicitly rejected other ideas on which Hitler's racial narrative depended. And Hitler didn't care whether there was any actual scientific basis for the ideas on which he relied. He was doing hate propaganda, not scholarly work.

Töppel also notes, "„Mein Kampf“ enthält im Vergleich zu Hitlers Reden und zu völkischen Schriften des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts weder überraschend Neues noch viel Originäres." ("In comparison to Hitler's speeches and to völkish writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mein Kampf contains neither anything surprisingly new nor much original.")

Hitler's racial propaganda was particularly focused on making "the Jews" the scapegoat for all resentments:

So entwickelten sich „Jude“ und „jüdisch“ letztendlich zu Chiffren für alles, was die Nationalsozialisten bekämpften. Laut einer Aufzeichnung des Unternehmers Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) sagte Hitler bereits im Dezember 1922: „Kampf gegen das Judentum ist eines der Hauptmomente in der Orientierung der Massen der nationalsozialistischen Partei. Dieses Schlagwort kann nicht aufgegeben werden, denn dadurch wird erreicht, daß die Massen in jedem Gegner, der aufgezeigt wird, ihren Todfeind sehen und sich danach einstellen.“

[So "Jew" and "Jewish" developed in the end to code words for everything that the National Socialists were fighting against. According to a record of the businessman Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) said that Hitler as early as December 1922 said: "Fighting against Judaism is one of the chief moments in the orientation of the masses of the National Socialist Party. This slogan cannot be given up, because through it will be achieved that the masses will see their mortal enemy {the Jews} in every opponent that is designated {for them} and then direct their fire at them.]

Christopher Browning on Netayahu's Holocaust revisionism

Christopher Browning addresses the now-notorious piece of Holocaust revisionism that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used before the Zionist Congress last Tuesday in A Lesson for Netanyahu from a Real Holocaust Historian Yahoo! News/Foreign Policy 10/22/2015.

On the particular claim that Netanyahu made about the Grand Mufti's advice to Hitler, Browning writes:

As of this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has undertaken an even more blatantly mendacious attempt to exploit the Holocaust politically. In a speech to the World Jewish Congress, Netanyahu claimed that at the time of the meeting between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, on Nov. 28, 1941, the former was still in favor of expelling Jews and the latter opposed this because the expelled Jews would come to Palestine. Instead, according to Netanyahu’s version of history, the mufti urged Hitler to “burn” them, thus becoming the prime instigator of the Final Solution. The Netanyahu account of this meeting is an historical fabrication, or more simply a lie.

That's one thing that someone like Browning, one of the world's preeminent Holocaust historians, can say directly with credibility: "The Netanyahu account of this meeting is an historical fabrication, or more simply a lie."

Browning also addresses the meeting to which Netanyahu referred:

There’s plenty more evidence contradicting Netanyahu’s account. Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, recorded the meeting with the mufti, and his memorandum of the meeting has long been available in the official publication of German foreign-policy documents. According to Schmidt, it was Hitler who assured the mufti that he had no territorial ambitions in the Middle East. Germans would come as liberators: “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.” Hitler conveniently and deceptively did not tell the Husseini that he deferred to Italy’s Benito Mussolini concerning the final disposition of Arab-populated territories in the Mediterranean region. As Hitler had done with Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and others, he seemed to be playing upon the wishful thinking of the grand mufti, trying to give the impression that if Arabs helped in the murder of Jews, this would facilitate their own national independence. Husseini, rather, was not the instigator of the Final Solution but rather the target of Hitler’s attempted manipulations.

He adds, "When Hitler met with Husseini, the fateful shift in Nazi Jewish policy from expulsion and decimation to systematic and total mass murder had already occurred."

Browning concludes his piece, "Netanyahu’s shameful and indecent speech is a disservice to anyone — Jew and non-Jew — for whom research, teaching, and preservation of the historical truth of the Holocaust has value, meaning, and purpose."

One thing that the work of Browning and other historians of the Holocaust have rightly stressed in that the mass killing operations by the Germans against the Jews and others took place in a wartime context. As he summarized his conclusions in The Nazi Decision to Commit Mass Murder: Three Interpretations: The Euphoria of Victory and the Final Solution: Summer-Fall 1941 German Studies Review 17:3 (Oct 1994):

I will argue that there were two decisions for implementation: mid-July 1941 for the total mass murder of Soviet Jewry and early October for the Final Solution in German-occupied Europe. Each of these decisions was probably preceeded [sic] by several months of preparation initiated by Hitler. Each coincided with a peak of victory euphoria on the eastern front that emboldened Hitler to pass the point of no return-a pattern consistent with his earlier decisions for the Lublin Reservation and "ethnic cleansing" in western Poland in September 1939 and for the Madagascar Plan in June 1940.

It was the conditions created by the world war, from the nationalist fanaticism it inspired to the fact of the German forces being physically in control of the territory where millions of Jews in Russia and eastern Europe lived, in which Hitler actually began implementing the "Final Solution."

Seriously misguided praise for Neville Chamberlain's Munich 1938 deal

Here's another piece on the ever-popular Hitler/Appeasement/Czechoslovakia issue: Nick Baumann, Neville Chamberlain Was Right Slate 09/28/2013.

I have a couple of problems with it. Even though he does mention several facts that usually don't come up. Because all we usually hear is, "Munich! Appeasement! Testosterone!"

• About the only decent sentence in it is, "But every war is not World War II, and every dictator is not Hitler."
• He doesn't even seem to realize that in the 1930s the word "appeasement" was just a synonym for "compromise" and didn't have any particular stigma attached to it.
• The name "Skoda" doesn't appear, the Czech city with massive arms works that was a key goal of Germany in taking Czechoslovakia and made a qualitative difference in their armaments capabilities. (George McGovern flew strategic bombing missions over Skoda in the Second World War.)
• He doesn't mention the mismatch between the British-French foreign policy strategy and their military capabilities when he's talking about armaments levels.

Oh, and there's there's this. He gets in a sentence about one key thing: "Soviet Russia was seen as a potential enemy to be feared, not a potential ally." Is he even aware that the USSR was offering to go to war on the side of Britain and France over Czechoslovakia? That would have had its problems, too. But it would have put Russia fighting on the British-French side in 1938 instead of 1941. Instead, the Munich deal left Moscow with a coldly pragmatic and accurate calculation that it was in their immediate interest to make a deal with Germany, i.e., the "Hitler-Stalin Pact," or, more formally, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Which was a huge reason why "Munich" was such a bad deal!

And this guy writes for Mother Jones!? Yikes!!

Tags: appeasement, germany, hitler, neville chamberlain

Threat inflation with Syria

The problem with making the leader of every country we want to go to war with into "Hitler" is that it has produced threat inflation again and again, exaggerating the danger of country after country, none of which were "Hitler."

Robert Fisk does a memorable takedown of the "Hitler" meme in a column mocking the shallow clichés being used to drum up support for a US attack on Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States (This bombardment of Syria with clichés shows no sign of stopping Independent 09/05/2013):

And then yet once more – how tired can you get of this mulch? – Kerry also felt he could compare Assad to Hitler. This is preposterous. Over a hundred thousand Syrians may well have died in this terrible war. But Hitler started a war that may have killed 70 million. Does Kerry maybe think that Hitler is still alive? The late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin thought that when he fantasized in a letter to Ronnie Reagan when he was invading Lebanon in 1982 that he felt he was advancing on Berlin (Arafat was the man in the bunker). And not long ago the now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us all that the crackpot president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at the time) was "worse than Hitler". So let’s have it just one more time: HITLER IS DEAD.

Tags: appeasement, germany, hitler, preventive war, second world war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Finally, Bashar al-Assad is officially our new "Hitler"

Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that Syrian President Bashar Assad has taken a dubious place in history, noting the regime's alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians outside Damascus on Aug. 21.

"Bashar al-Assad now joins the list of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein who have used these weapons in time of war," Kerry said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

- from Nick Gass, Kerry: Case against Assad the same Politico 09/01/2013

Of course! The US never goes to war against anybody but "Hitler."

Never mind that the thing that made Hitler "Hitler" was that he was an enemy that couldn't be appeased or deterred in his aims for external aggression, and was in command of the world's most powerful military (after Germany took over the Skoda arms works in Czechoslovakia that were ceded at the Munich Conference).

Syria's government is none of those things. So, other than everything that made Hitler "Hitler", I guess we could say that Bashar al-Assad is "Hitler" too.

One of my most popular posts here has been Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/2013. It discusses a paper by Jeffrey Record in which he warns about the dangers of making every potential opponent into Hitler:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

See also my posts, Review of The Specter of Munich by Jeffrey Record:

"Munich", "Munich", go away! 05/15/2008

Review of Making War, Thinking History by Jeffrey Record 11/18/2006:

No more "appeasement" 07/23/2008, which looks at Record's article, Retiring Hitler and "Appeasement" from the National Security Debate Parameters (Summer 2008), in which he says:

It is high time to retire Adolf Hitler and "appeasement" from the national security debate. The repeated analogizing of current threats to the menace of Hitler in the 1930s, and comparing diplomatic efforts to Anglo-French placating of the Nazi dictator, has spoiled the true meaning of appeasement, distorted sound thinking regarding national security challenges and responses, and falsified history. For the past six decades every President except Jimmy Carter has routinely invoked the Munich analogy as a means of inflating national security threats and demonizing dictators. Presidents and their spokespersons have not only believed the analogy but also used it to mobilize public opinion for war. After all, if the enemy really is another Hitler, then force becomes mandatory, and the sooner it is used the better. More recently, neoconservatives and their allies in government have branded as appeasers any and all proponents of using nonviolent conflict resolution to negotiate with hostile dictatorships. For neoconservatives, to appease is to be naïve, cowardly, and soft on the threat du jour, be it terrorism, a rogue state, or a rising great power. To appease is to be a Chamberlain rather than a Churchill, to comprise with evil rather than slay it. ...

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades and post-9/11 years contain examples of the danger of overestimating such threats. [my emphasis]

Tags: appeasement, dollfuss, fdr, franklin roosevelt, germany, hitler, jeffrey record, second world war

Did Heinrich Brüning have no other choice but austerity economics in the Great Depression?

German economic historian Knut Borchardt caused a stir in the late 1970s and 1980s when he offered a spirited defense of the austerity policies of the "Hunger Chancellor" Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970).

Brüning served as German Chancellor from March 30, 1930 to May 30, 1932, holding his office by Presidential decree rather than by normal Parliament electoral procedures. Unemployment and the human distress that came with it rose significantly during Brüning's Chancellorship, as did the votes for Hitler's NSDAP (Nazi Party) as they exploited the issue. The NSDAP's popular vote in parliamentary elections rose from 6.4 million in 1930 - already a huge increase in their support from 0.8 million in 1928 - to 13.7 million in 1932, for the first time getting more votes than the Social Democrats and Communists combined.

Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970)

Several things struck me in my first reading of Borchardt's argument. (Chapters 9-11 of his Wachstum, Krisen, Handlunsspielräume der Wirschaftspolitik. Studien zur Wirschafsgeschichte des 19. un 20. Jahrhunderts, 1982) One is that it sounded awfully like a dogmatic defense of Brüning's "Hunger Chancellor" policies. And he sounds like he basically wants to blame the whole economic problem of the Weimar Republic on greedy workers demanding too much in wages. Both of those inclined me to take a dim view of his argument.

And, like Brüning's other defenders, he also argues that the foreigners made him do, i.e., that the reparations demands of the First World War victor countries are largely to blame for the restricted scope of decision-making by Brüning's administration.

Between the greedy workers ruining the economy and the bad foreigners forcing him to do exactly what he did, what choice did poor Brüning have to pursue deflationary, pro-cyclical antilabor policies that exacerbated unemployment and gave the NSDAP (Nazi Party) their highest margin in Parliament in 1932?

Although he describes several possible alternatives, his descriptions are an odd mishmash of discussions of who advocated them, the fact that there were arguments against them, and suggestions that they weren't politically plausible anyway.

Doing "what if?" scenarios on historical events are tricky, and there is always an argument that what actually happened was the best of all feasible occurrences. But that method of looking at alternatives reduces history to a bare description of events. Which is why it is well suited to a polemical defense of whatever happened in the case being discussed.

The trickiness of it can be seen at the time of this writing in the January 1, 2013 tax bill that ended the phony "fiscal cliff crisis" in the US. Those who followed the disputes closely at this point could point to several feasible alternatives whose advocacy by key leaders might well have produced other results with other implications. But defenders of the deal do essentially what Borchardt does for Heinrich Brüning's entire record on economic policy as German Chancellor in 1930-32. They argue that the deal struck was the best of all possible worlds. Twenty years from now, it will be more of a challenge for an historian to make a case for alternatives, because what happened will be embedded in the various narratives of the whole period and the possible alternatives won't be so fresh in the minds even of those who followed the events closely at the time.

A more realistic way of looking at possible historical alternatives would be to state the alternatives clearly; look at who advocated those alternatives, who might have advocated them, and why those were either rejected or not seriously considered; and, examine the ways events might have developed if key decision-makers had taken an alternative approach.

Brüning's failures are most remembered now for their implications on the events that followed, which led to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Virtually everyone would agree that some alternative that would have avoided that eventuality could have produced a much better result for Germany and the world.

And the outlines of an alternative scenario to Hitler's actual selection as Chancellor are not that hard to produce. President von Hindenburg could have decided to keep Hitler out of the government. The key political figures in the decision like Kurt von Schleicher could have taken different positions. Hitler's Chancellorship wasn't a foreordained event of destiny. It was the result of concrete decisions taken by real people, people who could have decided differently. There are many other ways to approach that question, such as looking at the positions of the various political parties in the year before. And any "what if" scenario requires a certain amount of humility from the historian, a quality not always in abundant supply among academics. But there are more reasonable approaches than Borchardt's.

Borchardt was looking at a longer series of events than a discrete decision like Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. But he effectively eliminates any look at what might have happened if Brüning or other key figures had insisted on a very different course of action. If Brüning had refused to continue his austerity course and insisted to the Western Allies that the Weimar Republic would be destroyed if he did, France might have proved more accommodating than they actually were. Similarly, Borchardt seems oblivious to the fact that the NSDAP was benefiting mightily from the dire economic conditions Brüning's policies produced. If the Nazis could make an issue out of unemployment, why couldn't Brüning?

In history as it actually occurred, with Brüning's accession to the Chancellorship in 1930, the Weimar Republic degenerated into a semi-authoritarian state. And Brüning's Chancellorship represented a major step toward the Third Reich. On the other hand, Brüning was very much opposed to Hitler's participation in government, and he fled Germany when Hitler actually did take power. It's not a counter-factual to argue that he really didn't want Hitler to take over. Given that reality, it seems feasible on its face that Brüning could have decided on policies that would have combated unemployment, if only to deprive the Nazis of that issue. That didn't happen. But why it didn't happen is more complicated than Borchardt's steadfast defense of Brüning would suggest.

Tags: german history, heinrich brüning, hitler, knut borchardt, weimar republic

Hitler's and the NSDAP's employment programs during the Great Depression

Charles Kindleberger in his classic, The World in Depression 1929-1939 (1973) described the measures taken by Hitler and his NSDAP (Nazi Party) to combat unemployment after he took power in January 1933.

Kindleberger's description is deficient in two respects that are worth mentioning before getting to his text. The NSDAP was interested in creating jobs for so-called Aryan Germans, i.e., non-Jews. Jews were increasingly restricted in their employment and progressively pushed out of the civil service, the professions and eventually from the whole country. Most Jews who lived in Germany in January 1933 had passed away or emigrated by 1940, when Jews were completely banned from leaving the country. Those who did emigrate had most of their money and property confiscated by the Reich government. Both the restriction of employment by German Jews and the confiscations were significant factors in providing employment to "Aryan" Germans. Kindleberger's book omits discussions of the racial policy aspect of the NSDAP recovery program.

Kindleberger also makes the mistake that is still too common of assuming that the famous Autobahn highway project was primarily a civilian program. Originally planned under the Weimar Republic, the Autobahn construction was seen by Hitler first and foremost in its military aspect. Hitler's primary jobs program was war, and the Autobahn was part of that. In his very first cabinet meeting as Chancellor, he instructed his ministers to consider all such projects primarily with reference to their usefulness in rebuilding Germany's war capacity. The official record of the meeting relates the Führer's direction, "Dieser Gedanke müsee immer und überall im Voerdergrund stehen." ("This thought must always and everywhere stand in the forefront.") The Autobahn project was specifically discussed in that context at the same meeting. The transportation advantages offered by a good national highway system to a war economy was the priority reason for Hitler in building the Autobahn. (The ministerial meeting protocol is quoted by Hans-Henning Scharsach in Haiders Clan. Wie Gewalt entsteht, 1995)

Despite those two significant omissions, Kindleberger's description does a good job of showing how Hitler's employment policies were embedded in a system of coercion and far-reaching denial of rights to German workers, "Aryan" or otherwise. On the first International Workers Day that Hitler was in power, May 1, 1933, the Nazi government banned all independent trade unions and required workers to join a nationwide company union directed by the regime.

Kindleberger refers in the following to "socialist" aspect of the program of the NSDAP, the "S" standing for "socialist". The Nazis never took the "S" more seriously than a superficial, and failed, attempt to appeal to industrial workers. The working-class vote was largely divided between the two parties that understood themselves as distinctively representative of the working class, the Social Democratic (SPD) and Communist (KPD) Parties. The Röhm-Strasser wing of the NSDAP did call for more drastic curbing of the powers of the German capitalist class to be taken over by the German national state and the Nazi Party, which presented itself as the party of the Aryan race, not of the working class. Given the almost exclusively polemical usage of "socialist" in contemporary American politics, understanding the "socialist" rhetoric as used by the NSDAP is no doubt puzzling to most Americans who first encounter it.

Kindleberger refers to the purge of Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA (Brownshirts) paramilitary group, a purge that came in 1934 and became known as the Night of the Long Knives:

Hitler's accession to full power in March 1933 was a forecast of far-reaching changes in the German economic system. In Munich, in 1920, the National Socialist party had laid down a list of twenty-five points, largely economic and social, directed against capitalism, 'interest slavery', and the like, and in favour of colonies, land reform, pensions for old people and the development of the middle class through assistance to shopkeepers.

Those 1920 program demands were long retained but offer little actual guide to the policies the NSDAP pursued. The Party had allied throughout the twenties with other rightwing parties. And made a deal with German conservatives to get Hitler appointed as Reichskanzler in January 1933:

A four-year plan announced in the spring of 1933 promised the rescue of the peasant and the worker, the latter by an attack on unemployment. Agriculture was to be reformed through the establishment of the Reichsnährstand (Food Estate), which controlled prices and then production. Unemployment was attacked through conscription (in March 1935), the development of parastatal bodies, such as the storm troopers and the S.A., and especially in spending on public works and armaments. But the anti-capitalism of the initial stages did not survive for long. The purge of 30 June 1934 was not economic in origin, but it none the less had the effect of moving party doctrine in a more conservative direction in respect of income distribution, if not of control of industry. Control was provided by the law of 27 February 1934, 'Gesetz zur Vorbereitung des organischen Aufbaus der deutsche Wirtschaft' (Law for the Preparation of the Organic Constitution of the German Economy), which laid out a criss-crossed pattern of industrial and regional Überwachungsstellen (Control Offices). Initially, these Control Offices regulated imports on the basis of goods quantities, but this task was eventually turned over to the Reichsbank and operated through foreign-exchange controls. [my emphasis in bold]

The mechanisms used by the NSDAP government were not always in themselves dictatorial or distinct to the German regime. But, as Kindleberger notes there, public employment was provided to a major extent through military and paramilitary organizations, which Hitler planned to use for war, and much of the public spending was for armaments.

On 2 May 1933, the S.S. seized all offices of trade unions in Germany; officials were arrested, and union property was confiscated. The property was incorporated into the Nazi-controlled Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front), which included entrepreneurs and professional men as well as workers. Wages and working conditions were regulated'by Treuhänder der Arbeit (Labour Trustees), appointed for each district. The German Labour Front included Social Honour Courts to deal with abuses by employers or agitation by workers; and Kraft durch Freude ('Strength through Joy'), which organized workers and youth in holidays through taxes on workers' salaries. In particular, workers were required to carry a work book by which both their jobs and movements were controlled.

A great deal of historical works has been done in recent years on institutions like those acted as mechanisms of political and social control under the direction of the Nazi government, e.g., Götz Aly, Hitler Volksstaat. Raub Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (2005) and Götz Aly (ed), Volkes Stimme. Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozailismus (2006). But the topic had received excellent treatment in much earlier studies as well, like Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1942/1944).

Continuing with Kindleberger; he refers here to Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970), former German central banker who later served as Economics Minister under Hitler and as director of the office to develop a war economy:

Since an early task was to eliminate unemployment, the National Labour Service was established for a variety of projects ranging from agriculture, reclamation, road construction and,ultimately, military installations. It was made compulsory in June 1935. Workers with agricultural training were dismissed and sent back to farms. All labour was frozen in its jobs in 1934. A campaign was undertaken to drive women from gainful employment and back to the hearth. These efforts, it was later thought, prevented Germany from undertaking full mobilization after 1938 and during the Second World War.

Hjalmar Schacht fought hard to prevent deficit financing rising above a dangerous level until 1938,when he resigned. But spending for public works, including Autobahnen, was undertaken through special paper discounted by banks. The effect was rapidly to reduce unemployment from 6 million in October 1933 to 4·1 million a year later, 2·8 million in February 1935, 2·5 million in February 1936, and 1·2 million in February 1937. At the time when the Second Four-Year Plan was introduced, by Hitler in a speech at Nuremberg in September 1936, and formally in October of that year by Herman Goring, anti-depression policy was a thing of the past. Women who had received marriage loans were allowed to take jobs. The forty-hour week was ignored, although the forty-eight-hour week did not come in until August 1938. In June 1938,the Compulsory Labour Decree (Dienstverpflichtverordnung) provided that any inhabitant of the Reich had to accept any work or vocational training assigned to him or her by the Labour Front.

The Second Four-Year Plan also turned policy definitely away from unemployment towards preparation for war. It still [sic] contained schemes for public buildings and Autobahnen, but the emphasis was on providing synthetic industries in rubber, oil, fats, etc., to protect Germany against blockade in time of war. [my emphasis in bold]

John Kenneth Galbraith approached the German actions to combat the Great Depression from a different angle in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). Even Galbraith overstates the civilian nature of the Autobahn construction. But he points out how some of the technical levers used by the German government produced useful results in generating employment:

The Nazis were not given to books. Their reaction was to circumstance, and this served them better than the sound economists served Britain and the United States. From 1933, Hitler borrowed money and spent - and he did it liberally as Keynes would have advised. It seemed the obvious thing to do, given the unemployment. At first, the spending was mostly for civilian works - railroads, canals, public buildings, the Autobahnen. Exchange control then kept frightened Germans from sending their money abroad and those with rising incomes from spending too much of it on imports.

The Nazis weren't aiming at a "socialism" that would have put the means of production under the control of a workers' state, a definition that the SPD and KPD could presumably have agreed upon at the proverbial 30,000-ft. level in 1933. But the Nazis also weren't willing to confine themselves to the conventional advice that had been followed faithfully by the Weimar government from 1930 and whose results had brought the NSDAP to power.

Galbraith:

The results were all a Keynesian could have wished. By late 1935, unemployment was at an end in Germany. By 1936, high income was pulling up prices or making it possible to raise them. Likewise wages were beginning to rise. So a ceiling was put over both prices and wages, and this too worked. Germany, by the late thirties, had full employment at stable prices. It was, in the industrial world, an absolutely unique achievement.

Again, restrictions on non-"Aryan" workers and professionals and confiscation of money and property from emigrating Jews played a part in that result.

Galbraith suggests that a less doctrinaire examination of the German experience by foreign observers in the 1930s could have provided some useful empirical lessons.l :

The German example was instructive but not persuasive. British and American conservatives looked at the Nazi financial heresies - the borrowing and spending - and uniformly predicted a breakdown. Only Schacht, the banker, they said, was keeping things patched together. (They did not know that Schacht, so far as he was aware of what was happening, was opposed.) And American liberals and British socialists looked at the repression, the destruction of the unions, the Brownshirts [SA], the Blackshirts [the SS], the concentration camps, the screaming oratory, and ignored the economics. Nothing good, not even full employment, could come from Hitler. It was the American case that was influential.

Tags: hitler,

john kenneth galbraith, kindleberger, nazism, nsdap, great depression

Again on hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic and Hitler's rise to power

I posted back in January about Paul Krugman commenting on what has long been one of my pet peeves, the idea that the German hyperinflation of 1923 led directly to Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) taking power in 1933, nine years later.

M E Synon also posted on that same topic in February, Merkel forgets Germany's history: 'Austerity not inflation gave us Hitler' Daily Mail 02/07/2012:

... here are some lines from a letter to the editor in the Financial Times yesterday. It comes from Anthony Murray in Kingston-on-Thames.

Murray recommends that readers should study the record of Heinrich Bruning, a predecessor of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. They could discover 'the real reason for Germany's descent into Nazism.'

'Monetarist fetishists have helped to circulate a pernicious falsehood that the Weimar uber-inflation caused the rise of Hitler.'

'The wild inflation storm occured in 1924. [sic; it was actually 1923 - Bruce] The Weimar economy recovered from it.'

'The Nazis came to power only in 1933, as an immediate consequence of the deflationary spiral that resulted from what Mr Wolf [commentator Martin Wolf, in an earlier article] refers to aptly as the "catastrophic austerity" introduced by Bruning.'

In my earlier post, I included this table from Peter Gay's The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952):

Repeating what I wrote in January:

The hyper-inflation incident was primarily a phenomenon of 1923. This is the period about which those stories are told about a loaf of bread costing a wheelbarrow full of money or whatever. A new currency was introduced late in 1923 and inflation stabilized.

This chart of election results shows the election results in millions of votes for the NSDAP (National Socialists, Nazi Party). In 1924, the year following the hyper-inflation, the NSDAP got 0.9 million votes. That fell to 0.8 million in 1928. Then in rose dramatically to 6.4 million in 1930 and 13.7 million in July of 1932. What else might have happened between 1924 and 1930? What could it have been?

Oh, yeah, that Great Depression thing. Economic crash, soaring unemployment. And Heinrich Brüning's Chancellorship of 1930-32.

None of this implies that the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s had no lasting effect. It's just that it's hard to match the notion that hyper-inflation brought the Nazis to power with the historical record as shown in election results.

While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that the NSDAP vote dropped significantly from the July 1932 election to November 1932. It's true that Hitler came to power mostly through electoral means. But Hitler's  feverish politicking that got him appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933 was driven by his falling electoral support.

On the hyperinflation itself, see also Alexander Jung, Millions, Billions, Trillions: Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation Spiegel International 08/14/2009 14.08.2009

Tags: german history, hitler, hyperinflation, weimar republic

Krugman on European austerity and that German hyper-inflation thing

Paul Krugman has been looking at the lengths of the current depression in Britain and Italy compared with the Great Depression. In Britain, this one has gone on longer. (The Worse-than Club 01/28/2012) In Italy, it has gone on as long.

Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970)

And he makes an important historical point about the German economy in those days. Conservatives like to claim that the "hyper-inflation" in Germany in the 1920s resulted in bringing Hitler to power. Krugman writes:

France and Germany are doing much better than in the early 1930s - but then France and Germany had terrible, deflationist policies in the early 1930s. (It was the Brüning deflation, not the Weimar inflation, that brought you-know-who to power).

With two of Europe’s big four economies doing worse than they did in the Great Depression, at least in terms of GDP — and that’s three of five if you count Spain — do you think the austerity advocates might consider that maybe, possibly, they’re on the wrong track?

Peter Gay provided a helpful chart on this subjects in The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952):

The hyper-inflation incident was primarily a phenomenon of 1923. This is the period about which those stories are told about a loaf of bread costing a wheelbarrow full of money or whatever. A new currency was introduced late in 1923 and inflation stabilized.

This chart of election results shows the election results in millions of votes for the NSDAP (National Socialists, Nazi Party). In 1924, the year following the hyper-inflation, the NSDAP got 0.9 million votes. That fell to 0.8 million in 1928. Then in rose dramatically to 6.4 million in 1930 and 13.7 million in July of 1932. What else might have happened between 1924 and 1930? What could it have been?

Oh, yeah, that Great Depression thing. Economic crash, soaring unemployment. And Heinrich Brüning's Chancellorship of 1930-32.

None of this implies that the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s had no lasting effect. It's just that it's hard to match the notion that hyper-inflation brought the Nazis to power with the historical record as shown in election results.

While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that the NSDAP vote dropped significantly from the July 1932 election to November 1932. It's true that Hitler came to power mostly through electoral means. But Hitler's  feverish politicking that got him appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933 was driven by his falling electoral support.

Tags: german history, hitler, paul krugman, weimar republic

Berchtesgaden and the "Eagle's Nest" exhibit on National Socialism

I visited Obersalzburg in southern Germany (Bavaria) on Thursday and went to the "Eagele's Nest" site for the first time, the site Hitler used as his official retreat, though he mostly used the house high on the mountain for receiving official visitors. He and his generals planned some major military campaigns there, including the biggest of all, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

I didn't actually go up to the mountain house. The main attraction of doing so would be to see the spectacular view. But the day was rainy, overcast and very foggy. Plus the bus trip up there costs 15 euros, hardly worth the time or money for an eagle's view of more fog.

But fortunately, the museum-style exhibition is directly accessible from the road. It's and is called the Dokumentation Obersalzberg. It was set up in 1999, and I found it to be one of most informative and impressive of such historical exhibits I've seen.

The exhibit focuses on the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship itself. It's organized chronologically, beginning with some background on Hitler himself, e.g., the 1923 "Beer Hall putsch" in Munich. It then proceeds to the process of Hitler and the NSDAP (Nazis) taking power in January, 1933, proceeding to the events of 1933-1939 and then dealing with the Second World War and the internal wartime resistance to the regime.

The war actually occupies a small part of the exhibit, and that's intentional. The Dokumentation center describes itself as providing the history "über die Geschichte des Obersalzbergs und die NS-Diktatur" (about the history of Obersalzburg and the National Socialist dictatorship), so the focus is intended to be on the dictatorship itself and its functioning.

It's actually a relatively long exhibit, taking about three hours if you listen to the audio guide and read all or most of the exhibit's narrative. Several points struck me as particularly impressive. One is that it showed a good bit of the material that historians use as their raw material, without tormenting the average vistor with "historiography" as such. For example, it shows a copy of an SD report. The SD was a section of the SS which was devoted to providing political intelligence on the attitude of the German public. Even dictatorships have to have some basis of public support. And in the absence of elections, reliable opinion polls, independent "civil society" organizations, or an independent press, the SD reports were a main source of information for the Nazi leadership on public opinion.

Similarly, historians research the SD reports for the same purpose, though they take a more critical attitude about the biases of the source matertial. All governments like to be told what they want to hear, and dictatorships are particularly subject to being blinded by their own propaganda.

The exhibit also addresses the issue of Holocaust denial which became considerably more visible in the 1990s, though I didn't notice a specific mention of that despicable pseudohistorical trend. But it nevertheless provides an answer to the question on which Holocaust-deniers exploit to bamboozle their suckers: how do we know about the Holocaust?

This exhibit shows us. We know about it from official records, from specific written reports, from films, from an enormous number of photographs, from eyewitness accounts, from written contemporary accounts of eyewitnesses and participants, from mass graves, from the physical evidence at the death camps, and from demographics. The exhibit includes, for instance, a letter written by a soldier home to his wife describing his participation in the systematic murder of large numbers of Jews.

I use "soldier" generically there, because I don't recall if that particular letter was from a Wehrmacht soldier. A great deal of the killing in the east was done by SS Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei (order police). Christopher Browning decribes some of the latter in his book Ordinary Men, as does Danny Goldhagen in his much inferior Hitler's Willing Executioners. Many of the Ordnungspolizei wrote letters to their families and sent photos describing scenes from the mass killing.

The exhibit also does a good job of showing how the regime suppressed independent political parties and civil society organizations, not least independent labor unions. The Hitler regime celebrated International Workers Day on May 1, 1933. On May 2, they banned all labor unions and set up the Deutsche Arbeiters Front (DAF) as a giant, nationwide company union. Churches were the largest legitimate civil society organizations which offered some kind of independent pressure and/or resistance to the dictatorship. Organizations like the Hitler Youth and Kraft durch Freude (KdF, "strength through joy") offered recreational opportunities to the general population. But they were also thoroughly politicized and utilized for regime and NSDAP propaganda.

Surprisingly, very little of the exhibition material is available in English. Which is too bad, because the catalogue that seems on a quick examination to include most of the pictures and text of the exhibition itself is really quite good. It's considerably more informative than the typical documentary on the period from the History Channel, aka, the "Hitler Channel" because of the volume of Second World War material it provides.

Still, even for non-German speakers, the Dokumentation Obersalzberg is well worth visiting.

Tags: dokumentation obersalzberg, hitler, national socialism

Far-right isolationism

Congressman Hamilton Fish, bitter opponent of Franklin Roosevelt's war-preparedness program and active enabler of far-right propagandists

Let me start this by saying as I've said in a number of posts before that most warnings about "isolationism" are fake, straw-man arguments. At least outside of Ron Paul's political corner, there are no actual isolationists in American politics. Categorizing these things by "schools" is tricky. But there are basically three broad categories of thinking on foreign policy which are dominant in actual policymaking: liberal internationalism (aka, Wilsonianism), realism, and neoconservatism/unilateralist nationalism.

I've linked some of my earlier posts on the whole appeasement issue in the 1930s at the end of this post. But I agree with Jeffrey Record of the Air War College that the appeasement/"Munich" analogy has been so overused and so overlaid with various flaky meanings that we're probably better off not using it any more. It leads to mindless threat inflation and false parallels.

The great Maverick McCain, who of course is a Very Serious Person, said during the Republican Presidential debate this past week, "We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement." Invoking "appeasement" and "isolationism" as bogeymen has become so mindlessly routine that hardly anyone stops to notice how blatantly boneheaded such warnings often are. We allowed Hitler to come to power? The appeasement policy - it was actually called that, "appeasement" then being a synonym for concessions rather than a cuss word - was the policy pursued by France and England toward Germany when Hitler began his expansion beyond the limits allowed by Versailles Treaty, starting with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. The 1934 coup attempt in Austria was so badly bungled it didn't really count, although they did manage to murder the Austrian dictator Dollfuss.

But some of our press corps might want to ask the great Maverick how he would suggest the United States might have gone about preventing Hitler from coming to power in 1933. I took on the notion of preventive pre-regime change in More daffy history from Bush 11/01/07, including the difficulty of foreseeing Hitler coming to power at the time.

I came across a good description of Old Right isolationism that defines the strange conceptual world in which their "antiwar" stance is articulated. This goes back a ways. But Harry and Bonaro Overstreet in their 1964 book The Strange Tactics of Extremism described the weird worldview of the John Birch Society and others in their political niche in this way:

Here, we discover the key to the Birch Society's - and, more broadly, the Radical Right's - brand of anti-Communism. It is a brand that presents as unnecessary, or downright harmful, most of America's around-the-world activities and involvements. It is an anti-Communism which contends that, if it were not for treason and conspiracy in high places, we could, on our own - without the high costs of entangling alliances and big defense systems - make things happen as they ought to happen, all around the world. We could do so by pulling back out of the world, as it were, and simply cleaning up the mess in Washington. What we might need to do abroad, in military terms, could be done by a well-placed bomb or a regiment of Marines.

Communism's advance would be stopped in its tracks - so the argument runs - and Communist regimes would be toppled by the uprisings of suppressed peoples, if our government, direct by "Communist bosses," could be forced to stop underwriting Lenin's grand strategy with our tremendous resources of materials and know-how. (my emphasis)

If you listen carefully to what Ron Paul and similar isolationist rightwingers are saying, their brand of nationalism is coming from a very similar place. They want to discard normal diplomacy, foreign aid, even the threat of economic and trade sanctions from the set of foreign policy tools available to the United States. They are not far from the neocons in that essential focus. As the Overstreets described the perspective 43 years ago, "What we might need to do abroad, in military terms, could be done by a well-placed bomb or a regiment of Marines."

Is that so different from Ron Paul's response to Maria Bartiromo's question on how he would deal with a challenge to the United States from Iran if Iran should "turn hostile"? "I'd treat them something like what we did with the Soviets" during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he told her.

Here's an interview with isolationist author Jim Powell with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio. (This is not the Scott Horton with with an Atlantic Harper's Online blog.) For those of us who actually pay attention to history and think it may have some importance, claims like Powell's are fingernails-on-the-blackboard difficult to listen to. He chirps away with the bonehead rightwing claim that the postwar inflation through 1923 was what brought Hitler to power in 1933. Hitler's NSDAP (Nazi Party) was competing in free elections during that time. It wasn't until the Great Depression of 1929 that their electoral strength became anything but minor. It's a stretch to argue that inflation had any direct effect on Hitler's rise to power. But lots of people just make this stuff up to suit their own ideology of the moment. It did crack me up to hear him talk about Hitler's "Beer Hall Pooch"; I think he meant "Beer Hall Putsch", the "put" part being pronounced like the English word "put". This is a clean-shaven version of Old Right isolationism, and so some individual points sound perfectly sensible. But it uses their standard alternative history. And the core of Old Right isolationism is radical unilateralism.

Fritz Kuhn, center, leader of the German-American Bund (1939)

Justin Raimondo gives an Old Right isolationist response to McCain's criticism of Ron Paul in McCain's Mangled Metaphor Antiwar.com 11/30/07. Although it might not be instantly apparent to the casual reader, he uses the same fingernails-on-blackboard version of German history that Jim Powell uses:

Hitler came to power not due to any "appeasement" by the Western powers, but because of World War I. He was elected by the German people ... due to resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, and the heavy burden of reparations which unleashed inflation such as the world had never seen on the German economy. This created the conditions under which German national socialism flourished – and when Hitler was installed in the German Chancellory, it was long past the time when anyone in Europe's capitals or in Washington could do anything about it.

Short version of response: Hitler came to power in January 1933through a backroom political deal with conservatives; the NSDAP had actually lost representation in the last parliamentary election before that. And while the NSDAP used legal and democratic methods, they also had effective goon squads that busted heads. The violent methods were particularly effective against the Center Party. So you can't say that the NSDAP came to power through purely democratic means.

The "inflation caused Nazism" is just such a beloved argument for conservatives I'm not sure actual history can ever dislodge it.

Yes, the punitive elements of the Versailles Treaty are generally recognized as a major element in the rise of rightwing parties like the NSDAP in the 1920s. But it's also true that the democratic Weimar governments (I would say semi-democratic from 1931-33) had already negotiated modifications in the most onerous provisions.

Some of my earlier posts touching on the appeasement policy of the 1930s:

The Munich Agreement 10/02/03 (one of my earliest blog posts)

Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06

Review of The Specter of Munich by Jeffrey Record 01/02/07

Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07

Tags: appeasement, authoritarianism, hitler, isolationism, mccain, munich agreement, ron paul

Communazis, Islamofascists, who can tell these scary foreigners apart?

The original Hitler really was a "Hitler"

I've discovered that public libraries sometimes make available online their digital subscriptions to various journals. Which is how I came across this article that I've been meaning to look up for a long time, "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s" by Les Adler and Thomas Paterson American Historical Review Apr. 1970.

I had seen this particular quote referenced several times:

Americans after the Second World War also blended their images of the German Führer. and the Soviet Premier. Stalin was a new Hitler, demagogic, dictatorial, demanding personal loyalty, conniving to rule other peoples. The tough but friendly "Uncle Joe" of wartime propaganda became the paranoid tyrant of the cold war, aping Hitler. The president of the University of Notre Dame articulated the widely held assumption that Stalin mas continuing Hitler's viciousness. Iron Age concluded that "Stalin has succeeded to the mantle of Hitler as a menace to world peace.' George Meany of the American Federation of Labor called Stalin "the Russian Hitler," and General Donovan believed that Stalin was in fact more ruthless and thorough than the Führer. (my emphasis)

I have always been curious to see how they described this happening.

The short answer would be, the Munich analogy, fear, lack of knowledge about European affairs, a vague idea of "totalitarian" dictatorships.

I've blogged a number of times about the "lessons of Munich", in The Munich Agreement 10/02/03, Bad historical analogies 10/10/04, Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06, Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07, and my reviews of Jeffrey Record's books Making War, Thinking History 11/18/06 and The Specter of Munich 01/02/07. Record argues that the analogy has been so overused and used normally in such a shallow way that we'd probably be better off to just stop using it. But old habits die hard. And that habit was firmly established in the early days of the Cold War, as Adler and Paterson explain.

They point out that a number of prominent voices even during the Second World War, when the US, Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, were making an analogy to prewar Germany and the USSR:

Perhaps the most significant, and the most misleading, part of the Nazi-Communist analogy was that drawn between the prewar and wartime military actions of Germany and those of Russia in the postwar period. As Soviet armies marched into Eastern Europe on the heels of the defeated Wehrmacht, many Americans perceived it as immediate aggression rather than as wartime liberation. A clear example of this process was the early transposition of the American vocabulary applied to the Nazi domination of Europe. It was assumed, without understanding the Soviet security concerns or its national interest, that Russia was simply replacing Germany as the disrupter of peace in Europe. The term "satellite," first applied to German domination of Rumania and Hungary, was easily transferred to Russian hegemony in postwar Eastern Europe. (my emphasis)

Since this article apparently isn't available online without subscription, it's worth quoting more from this particular part of the Adler/Paterson article. First came the over-simplistic identification of the Soviets in eastern Europe with prewar Hitler Germany:

It was thus the view of many leading Americans that Russia, like Germany - before, was going to sweep over Europe in a massive military attack. Lewis H. Brown argued that Russia "is the dread of every family in Western Europe every night when they go to bed." Such sentiment encouraged the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other regional alliances. J. Howard McGrath anticipated the arguments in 1947 when he told the Senate: "Today it is Trieste, Korea, and Manchuria, tomorrow it is the British Empire. The next day it is South America. And then - who is so blind as to fail to see the next step?" In 1948 Secretary of State George C. Marshall recalled his prewar experience of watching "the Nazi government take control of one country after another until finally Poland was invaded in a direct military operation." His words clearly suggested the parallel with postwar Russia.

George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on the Soviet Union in Moscow and Washington considered by most observers as the architect of the containment policy, attempted in 1956 to dispel a myth that he himself had helped create years earlier. "The image of a Stalinist Russia," he argued. "poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of the Western imagination." (my emphasis)

First the parallel, then ... the "lessons of Munich":

"Munich" and "appeasement" returned as terms of humiliation and shame to haunt postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union. Responding to Roosevelt's agreement at Yalta to allow the Soviet Union three votes in the United Nations General Assembly, Senator Arthur Vandenberg indicated that among the members of the American delegation to the San Francisco United Nations meeting "there is a general disposition to stop this Stalin appeasement. It has to stop sometime. Every surrender makes it more difficult . In defending the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Vandenberg remarked that "I think the adventure is worth trying as an alternative to another 'Munich' and perhaps to another war. ..." To the suggestion made at a cabinet meeting in September 1945 that the United States eliminate its monopoly of atomic bombs and nuclear information in the interests of peace, [Defense] Secretary Forrestal replied that "it seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement." Barron's chastised [Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President] Henry Wallace in 1946 for his advocacy of disarmament in atomic weapons through an agreement with Russia and wrote that he had an "appeaser's dream." In 1950 General Douglas MacArthur considered the policy of containing rather than unleashing Chiang Kai-shek to be "appeasement," and he chastised those in the administration who would not escalate the Korean War, for they were adhering to "the concept of appeasement, the concept that when you use force, you can limit the force." Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 presidential campaign, argued that a withdrawal of American troops to allow "Asians to fight Asians ... would risk a Munich in the Far East, with the possibility of a third world war not far behind." Since the cry of appeasement was pervasive in the American mind, diplomats may have been less willing to bargain and more willing to adopt uncompromising positions vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, for some, diplomacy and appeasement were probably nearly identical in meaning, and diplomacy with totalitarian states meant concession to principle. This national stance was suggested by President Truman in his Navy Day speech of October 1945 when he stated that "we shall firmly adhere to what we believe to be right; and we shall not give our approval to any compromise with evil." Such an attitude had a paralyzing effect on international give and take and certainly impeded the accommodation of international differences. (my emphasis in bold)

Those phrases have become so familiar now. So is their misuse, and their simplification to meaning "international relations is a testosterone contest. We've gotta show the other guy that our God is bigger than his God." It's become downright traditional by now.

From "Uncle Joe" to the New Hitler in practically no time

We've also collected a number of more examples of what threat inflation and misreading an opponent on the basis of superficial analogies and poor understanding of the specific conditions involved can lead to.

The Truman statement highlighted near the end of that last quote is also a reminder that good-vs.-evil language in foreign policy certainly didn't originate with the Cheney-Bush administration, although they have taken it to cartoonish lengths.

I'm not planning to review the whole origin of the Cold War here. Up to a point, this was understandable and even sensible. George Kennan once wrote that in the decade or so prior to 1939, both Germany and the USSR had been practicing a brand of international politics that made the gangland wars in Chicago during Al Capone's day look like a kid's game. The 1939 pact between Germany and the Soviet Union also encouraged the idea in many Americans' minds that there was something fundamentally similar in the two "totalitarian" systems.

The problem was that it led to simplistic and misleading assumptions. Adler and Paterson illustrate this by a quote from atomic physicist Leo Szilard:

In 1949 Professor Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: "Soviet Russia is a dictatorship no less ruthless perhaps than was Hitler's dictatorship in Germany. Does it follow that Russia will act as Hitler's Germany acted?"" Szilard did not think so, and his question emphasizes at once the major assumption and the major weakness of the Nazi-Communist analogy: that conflict with totalitarianism was inevitable after World War 11; that there was no room for accommodation with the Soviet Union because the Communist nation was inexorably driven by its ideology and its totalitarianism. It followed from such reasoning that the United States could have done nothing to alleviate postwar tension. Such a notion, however, ignores the important years 1945-1936 when the possibilities for accommodation were far greater than later in the decade. (my emphasis)

In other words, it was an assumption that often obscured important particulars instead of illuminating them.

For instance:

What is more important for this discussion, however, is not that they [Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR] were different, but that many Americans took the unhistorical and illogical view that Russia in the 1940's would behave as Germany had in the previous decade. ...

Americans drew little distinction between the German drive for European domination and the Soviet interest in revolution-between military attack and internal revolution. The Marxian philosophy looked for social and economic improvement among disadvantaged people, whereas, as Hans Buchheim has suggested, fascism was designed not to improve mankind, but rather to destroy that part it disliked. Wolfgang Sauer recently wrote that "Neither V. I. Lenin nor Joseph Stalin wished to turn the clock back; they not merely wished to move ahead, but they wished to jump ahead. The Bolshevik revolution had many elements of a development revolution not unlike those now under way in the underdeveloped countries." The American failure to note distinctions between military fascism and revolutionary Marxism has contributed to a simplistic view of revolutionary and anticolonial movements in the post-World War I1 era and has led to the establishment of world-wide alliances and permanent military containment policies in Europe and Asia. As Professor Robert F. Smith has written, "This distorted use of historical analogy vastly oversimplifies not only the policies of Russia and China, but also the nationalistic reform movements around the world."

The Hitler-Stalin comparison has also been superficial and misleading. Sauer has written that "The social and political order of Bolshevism is relatively independent from the leadership. ... Fascist regimes, by contrast, are almost identical with their leaders; no fascist regime has so far survived its leader." Kennan himself attempted to convince his readers in 1956 that Stalin's intentions, though menacing in Western eyes, were "not to be confused with the reckless plans and military timetable of a Hitler."" Brutal and idiosyncratic as Stalin was, there is little evidence, as Kennan has indicated, to suggest that he was a madman bent on world conquest and subjugation. (my emphasis)

False analogies can be very misleading. Threat inflation can be just as disastrous a mistake as underestimating threats.

For those who dream up wars, it's far more entertaining to pose as Churchill standing up to the barbarians, which seems to the neocons' favorite image. But realistic assessment of national security threats and reality-based analysis of the intentions and capabilities of potential opponents are likely to produce far better foreign policy. And get fewer people killed unnecessarily.

Tags: cold war, hitler, stalin