That wouldn’t make it true because “yawn” is not an assertion of the proposition “I yawned”, but a non-cognitive expression of boredom/contemptuous disinterest.
I think I actually preferred it the way it was. As it was, when I got bored of the detailed retelling of the minutia of Hitler's rise to power in Part 3, I just skipped straight to Part 4, which was actually interesting. If they'd been mixed together, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
If I had a revision to recommend, I'd recommend a note at the beginning of Part 3 saying "This includes a lot of historical detail that not all readers will care about; feel free to skip straight to my analysis in Part 4." Or, you know, make Part 3 way shorter--but I assume some readers will appreciate the detail.
I definitely appreciated the detail. The devil is often in them, and I'd only had the barest grasp on the history. I knew maybe 20%, if I'm being generous, of what the overview gave.
I don't know enough about the historical subject matter to have an opinion about the content, but in reading this, I'm starting to wonder if people on the internet have been taking the 'literally Hitler' bit more seriously than I realized.
Speaking anecdotally, I've known a few of people who have invoked that phrase (or something semantically identical) in regard to pretty mainstream, moderate, conservative political parties, one of whom was actually German. All were pretty left-leaning, so it's possible there's some motivated reasoning there. By all appearances they were serious, and reinforced their position on pushback, including what I perceived as a significant degree of aggression.
So it's definitely A Thing That Happens. I'm not speaking to how often, but prevalence is non-zero.
Austria required peacetime national service which Hitler had been ducking, and going to Munich allowed him to dodge it entirely. Not really clear if he was opposed to serving alongside his fellow Jewish and Slavic citizens or was just not keen on suffering the discipline and boredom of being in a peace time army, Hitler being a fairly lazy man by all accounts.
Interestingly, Mussolini was convicted of avoiding military service as a young socialist, then later broke from other socialists by advocating Italy join the first world war.
Good point, it is more of a synopsis than a review. I read Shirer some years ago and agree that this writeup is a very good synopsis.
I just finished a good new history of the 1848/49 revolutions ("Revolutionary Spring" by Christopher Clark), and the point about a revolutionary movement needing to be pre-organized and ready to take charge of the apparatus of government comes through strongly. Several of those revolutions were initially successful but turned out to have no plan for actually running things, which helped them quickly flounder in power and they were then swept away by successful counter-revolutions.
Those 1848/9 events were prominent in the collective memory across Europe until World War I, and three of the key locations had been Vienna, Berlin, and Baden (SW Germany). So I wonder now if practical lessons from 1848 were an influence on the tactical thinking of a guy who was born in Austria in 1889.
That also sounds somewhat like the Leninst idea of a "revolutionary vanguard", in that they're both trying to solve the problem of the dog catching the car.
The modus operandi of a revolution is 1. You have something that I want. 2. I will take it forcibly from you. 3. I will feast for a week on the spoils I have taken from you. 4. Thereafter all bets are off, except that life will be very interesting.
That's one version of a revolution. A big takeaway from the history of 1848 is that in real life, with all its complexities of human motivations, there are several different versions. Very different.
> I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913.
In 1909 Admiral Lord Fisher predicted pretty much the exact month WW 1 would start in 1914, based on the time the Germans would complete their frantic digging to widen the Kiel Canal, and allow their High Seas Fleet access to the North Sea and beyond. Apparently a German diplomat told him he was the most hated man in Germany, by the Kaiser down! :-)
The UK was lucky to have someone as competent and far sighted as Fisher running the navy, and modernising it in the face of determined opposition from complacent politians and even most of his fellow officers. I think there's little doubt that without him we would have lost WW1 and the Kaiser's troops would have been goose stepping down Whitehall!
ob-trivia: (From the WIkipedia article) Fisher is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest known use of the phrase "OMG" as an abbreviation for "Oh my God", in a letter to Winston Churchill on 9 September 1917!
edit: On reflection, it's puzzling that the Germans originally built a fleet of warships at a location where they couldn't reach the open sea. It was as if the US had built several ocean-going aircraft carriers in Nebraska! :-)
"The creation of Austria-Hungary under the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 separated the Empire into independent Austrian and Hungarian governments. Only the army, foreign affairs, and related budgetary matters remained with the emperor, who held supreme command of all forces in time of war. A new army law decreed universal three-year conscription followed by a ten-year reserve obligation. In practice, only about one in five of those liable to service were called up, and many were sent on leave after two years. "
"I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913."
They may not have put a precise date on it, but 'when is the next big continental war going to break out?' was a staple of the politics of the time:
"Although sometimes dismissed as fanciful and lacking touch with the realities confronting the forces at his disposal, as a chief of General Staff Conrad had ensured the army had remained vigilant and planning for war was at an advanced stage by 1914, although it has been argued that reorganisation and redeployment should have been sweeping in the aftermath of the Redl affair."
The Sherlock Holmes stories are full of "we need to find this missing treaty or else, because affairs are at such a pitch war is likely if this is made public" plotting for stories published in 1904 or thereabouts, and the novel "The Riddle of the Sands" was written in 1903 about German plans to invade England by sea:
"But Emperor Wilhelm II's policy of building up the German Navy and challenging British sea power effected a change in the actual power relations – reflected in the specific literary genre of invasion novels and the identity assigned to the possible invader of British soil.
As described in its author's own words, Riddle of the Sands was written as "... a story with a purpose", written from "a patriot's natural sense of duty", which predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. The whole genre of "invasion novels" raised the public's awareness of the "potential threat" of Imperial Germany. Although the belief has grown that the book was responsible for the development of the naval base at Rosyth, the novel was published in May 1903, two months after the purchase of the land for the Rosyth naval base was announced in Parliament (5 March 1903) and some time after secret negotiations for the purchase had begun. Although Winston Churchill later credited the book as a major reason why the Admiralty had decided to establish the new naval bases, this seems unlikely. When war was declared he ordered the Director of Naval Intelligence to find Childers, whom he had met when the author was campaigning to represent a naval seat in Parliament, and employ him. At the time Childers was writing Riddle he was also contributing to a factual book published by The Times in which he warned of outdated British army tactics in the event of "conflicts of the future". He developed this theme in two further works he published in 1911: War and the Arme Blanche and German Influence on British Cavalry."
Ambitions by all the major European powers, the Scramble for Africa, and the web of treaties, alliances, secret agreements and "if they do X, I promise we will help you do Y" arrangements as well as everyone building up their army (and navy if they could manage it) with The Latest Modern Technology In Making Things Go Boom meant that there was a constant undercurrent of "not if but when" about war.
The last central European wars, Prussia's defeats of Denmark, Austria and France in 1864-1870, had been quick and efficient, so European military officers had assumed the next war would be too. The Euros paid little attention to how drawn out had been the American civil war of 1861-1865, especially the last year of trench warfare, because they were just American incompetents, so what could brilliant Euros learn from amateur Yanks?
You are wrong in IV. 2. when you say that someone claiming to support liberalism "can’t condone tactics that go outside of liberal norms." The magic words that let one do so are "Popper's paradox of tolerance." Then one is licensed to engage in "spiritual terror" ("vicious personal attacks" and "weaponization of social pressure" clearly describe "cancel mobs") and "physical terror" ("Punch a Nazi," anyone?).
"Her own formula, so she declared, was the more rational, since it was looser and more flexible and could be expected to assume an optimum organizational configuration in a very short time. ... In any case, the evolutionary process would present an absorbing and instructive exercise."
- "Throy" by Jack Vance
Edit: in case it's not clear, this is referring to, more or less, "heads on spikes".
I came here to mention this same weakness, although I wasn't planning on suggesting any present-day examples.
The difference is whether the party is in power or not. A weak party has to maintain coherence, or their hypocrisy will hurt them. But a party with power over the press can betray their ideals without consequence.
I am broadly sympathetic to the idea of not using examples that would tribalize the discussion, but "weaponization of social pressure" struck me as so on-the-nose that scrupulously omitting the obvious example felt … disingenuous isn't quite the right word, but it's close.
The example that's springing to mind is Sulla. There's a man who seized dictatorial power, sincerely tried to reestablish the Roman Senate as the center of power, and ended up just setting the stage for Caesar.
I'm not saying that, ya know, they'll lose, I'm saying that it won't be liberalism anymore. Or, to take an example from English history, you can play the Long Parliament game but don't be surprised when a Cromwell arises.
A more direct example here is the way in which the Papen government dissolved the (democratic and semi-autonomous) local administration of Prussia and replaced it with a directly-appointed commissioner…setting an unfortunate precedent for the Nazis to replace any independent authority in the state with their own people.
What was the name of that notorious white separatist that was famous for a little bit? Spencer? Didn't he get literally punched on live TV by someone who believed in punching Nazis?
This was brilliant. Thanks for the moral courage to flout Godwin's law. What's most striking is how few anti-Hitlerians dare to emulate his virtues, instead of merely condemning his vices....
# A Morally-Neutral Hitlerian Playbook
1. Be abundantly clear on your true goals
2. Recruit true believers
3. Ensure all actions align with those goals
4. Use your consistency to demonstrate the weakness of your opponents
5. First build a highly-structured alternate state before taking over the old one
6. Wait for the right crises (or create your own in a values-aligned way), then act boldly
7. Build a resource-generating flywheel from partial sympathizers
Yeah, that was the most surprising thing I’ve learned about politics: that both the American revolution and the civil rights movement were primarily built on morally-superior organizing, not rhetoric or public acts.
Yep both of those examples come to mind. Also Mao in China.
All of those numbered steps except #5 apply to the US women's-suffrage movement too.
And in another example which, like Hitler, did not achieve its ultimate desired outcome, the US Confederacy did the first four steps quite intentionally and competently. [20th-century gum-flapping over what the Civil War was "really about" was all Monday morning quarterbacking driven by modern agendas, the Confederate leaders at the time were clear and blunt on that question amongst themselves and their supporters.]
On step number 5 they were a mixed bag -- quite successful in organizing militarily but less so administratively.
For a while it also looked like the Confederates had found the right moment to "act boldly" (#6): a prediction market during 1862/3 would have been pretty sure on the Confederacy ending up successfully separated.
They didn't achieve #7 though, and it may be that they really couldn't win once the North got its own act together.
The uprising in the colonies against the rightful authority of the Crown was anything but morally superior.
(Also see what staying under the alleged 'tyranny' of the Crown did to the loyalists in the north: Canada turned out just fine, even without 'Freedom'.)
I should have found a better word. The American revolutionaries may not have been more “moral” than the Tories, but they built a more “virtuous” system of inclusive governance through, eg, decentralized Committees on Public Safety and a coherent Continental Congress.
I like to imagine an alternate timeline where the right crises never occur and Hitler gets bored after a while and quits the party to go back to making bad art or uses his political connections to nab a seat on the board of some Bavarian regional savings and loan, where he can get paid without having to do any real work.
Emotionally, I agree with you. Rationally, I have a hard time imagining a better outcome for Germany (or for that matter Israel and the US) than Germany militarizing then losing to the US. But maybe we would have gotten “cowpox” Nazism with someone less charismatic than Hitler.
Yeah, that’s kind of my point. Without Hitler remilitarizing Germany, might it have been annexed by Stalin? Without Pearl Harbor, would the US have been prepared to fight the Cold War?
Of course, maybe the Leftists are right and an isolationist US would have given Russia the space it needed to evolve organically into a humane socialist republic. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, unless we find a Hari Seldon to perfect computational politics so we can prove out counter-factual scenarios.
With Stalin in control and seemingly fine killing millions of his own people, I'm not so optimistic that the USSR could have ever straightened out, even if the west left it alone.
I don't know; the idea that a timeline where WWII happens is the best we can hope for is a pretty grim perspective. On the other hand, 5-6 years ago I read Albert Speers' memoir Inside the Third Reich, and he talks at length about what "audacious mediocrities" most of the upper tier Nazis were. Of the 60 or so gauleiters who formed the backbone of the party leadership, there weren't 10 college degrees between the lot of them. Ribbentrop was made foreign minister despite having no diplomatic training; his chief qualification for the job was that as a former wine seller, he had travelled abroad to France and Italy, something which most other senior Nazis had never done. Speer himself was made Minister of Armaments, despite having no military training or experience in heavy industry. You could imagine an alternate universe where overall Nazi competence was a touch higher and they manage to not merely put the Soviets on the ropes in the early '40's, but actually knock them out of the war and commit even worse atrocities in Eastern Europe.
For Germany to have actually "knocked out" Russia would require the British and Americans to be a bit more wary of Stalin and give him less aid.
Factory bombings didn't do what they said it would, but when one side has all its factories in areas that can be bombed and the other side doesn't, the way to bet is that the eventual winner will be the side with the unbombable areas.
Slight spoilers for the book I'm mentioning, but Stephen Fry's novel "Making History" plays with an alternate history where Hitler was never born, which ends up taking things in a direction pretty similar to what you describe.
Spelled out like that, it occurs to my the Moldbug has explicitly endorsed most of that playbook. To my knowledge, he's only actually acted on 1 (definitely) and 3 and 4 (arguably), though. He's written a bunch advocating 5 and 6 especially, but he hasn't actually acted on them unless that's what Urbit is supposed to be about.
#6 is really the tricky part, isn't it? External conditions had to be just right for Hitler to find an opening. The Reichstag Fire could have been anything. The Great Depression had to be the Great Depression, with policymakers all over the world shooting the moon on their responses.
I'm struck by how quickly the Nazis organized to achieve total power after taking power in January 1933. Neither the Russian Bolsheviks nor the Italian Fascists moved so fast when given the chance. It could be that the Nazis benefited from studying the history of the Bolsheviks and Fascists. Or it could be that being Germans, and having been through the Great War, they were just immensely organized.
In terms of 'lessons learned', I think it's important to note that any would-be authoritarian dictators are now working in a post-Hitler world.
Society has done a really good job of becoming inoculated to the stimulus 'this person acts like Hitler'. When Hitler was rising to power, he was free to make all the spittle-flecked hate speeches he wanted, and it all seemed fresh and new and exciting. But if you tried that now, you would remind people of Hitler. Which would dampen your message somewhat.
I'm being kind of flippant, but I don't think you can just look at "the elements that let Hitler take over", and expect them to be replicated today by a would-be dictator. Any wannabe führers in 2023 have to work very hard to not seem like Hitler, so their methods and rhetoric are going to be completely different. Like, the closest equivalent we have to Hitler today is probably Putin, and he used a combination of 'being a faceless bureaucrat' with 'having lots of friends in the KGB' to become an evil overlord.
I just don't think you can generalise. Hitler was Hitler. The next fascist dictator will be something else.
We've already had the next twenty Hitlers, and they were all explicitly anti-fascist.
Most of them were Communists, and Communism is a mild variation on Fascism with some of the economic rhetoric changed and a lot of "fascism bad boo" thrown in (at least, post-WW2 Communism is that).
Putin, who is no longer explicitly Communist, justifies his Ukraine war by being against "Nazism".
And in the West we've mostly avoided dictators, but the groups most likely to be acting like brownshirts in the streets are the people who call themselves "Antifa".
In machine learning this is called overfitting. In medicine it's more like an autoimmune disease. We've literally learned "Nazis bad" but nothing else. We've learned "Nazis bad" but forgotten to learn anything about Nazis.
In Germany, a radical extremist illiberal right-wing party is currently on the rise, with one of its main thinkers being "anti-globalist" and "against the masterminds behind the US Government".
And the thing one could take from this review is that "acting like brownshirts in the streets" is *not* what makes something similar to the Nazis, but their enmity of the system, and their willingness and ability to build parallel structures.
Yes, I phrased that wrongly - it should have been "acting like brownshirts in the streets" *alone* is not...
It is one ingredient, but Antifa seems to be missing all the other ingredients (at least in Germany, I am not so well informed about the situation in other countries).
The extreme right in Germany has a political party and an ideological movement that is not strictly part of the party, but aligned with it. So in the party, one (mostly) gets the part that is on constitutional grounds, while the anti-establishment sentiments are expressed in demonstrations.
In the US, Antifa seems to be organized somehow, but I don't think anyone not in the organization really knows how. In my city, they seem to be able to put together ~50-100 people dressed all in black, wearing black masks and hoods, armed with blunt weapons (and maybe more), ready to commit violence against their enemies, or more usually intimidate them.
I don't track them, but they seem to mostly show up where their counterparts on the right are, or where they think they might be. I haven't heard of any direct involvement with mainstream politics yet. So that's not as bad as it could be.
Although there was someone putting up those "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings" posters in my neighborhood.
A huge number of German men fought in the the Great War, and a certain percentage of them, like Hitler, thought it was the best thing ever. In contrast, only a small %age of the American right fought in 21st Afghanistan and Iraq and though it was awesome, while almost none of the American left did.
As we've seen in Portland in this decade, a certain number of leftists like street violence, but they've only succeeded because the leftist politicians have impeded the much larger percentage of rightist cops from doing their job in Portland.
People tend to fight the last war. Worrying about literal Nazis in 2023 is like worrying about the monarchists in Germany (or after this many years, about the Peasants's Revolt) in 1932.
Well, I'd be really happy if you were right, but if anti-democratic, anti-liberal, xenophobic and in part anti-semite factions are the leading voices in the strongest opposition parties, this seems like the prudent thing to worry about.
Hearing what I have to assume is AFD described this way makes me think.
An alternate question to "When can we really know there's another Hitler on the way" is "How can we use the fear of Hitler most effectively to prevent the loss of our power."
Of course, I've had a thought like this since Scott started this, from the Scott quote used at the top of this review. "Illiberal repression" is what we fear. Therefore, liberal repression is acceptable. And in a comment like this, perhaps liberal repression should be enforced. Recently Scott actually wrote about this, in his post about bad definitions of Democracy and Accountability. It's too bad such insights seem to never stick anywhere when relevant.
I live in Germany, and I am scared of the rise of that party. They are strongly intermeshed with the "Neue Rechte", that bases it's thoughts on illiberal, anti-democratic thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt.
Höcke answers in his book, when asked "But isn't the idea of re-establishing fascism as a "softer" variant to the hard, racist NS ideology floating around in some right-wing circles?"
"I don't think much of that. One can hardly deny its historical impact and its serious attempts to overcome the liberalist crises of the early 20th century. But we Germans don't need a "Casa Pound movement" like the one you allude to in Italy: we have Prussia as a positive role model."
In my opinion, Prussia is *not* a positive role model. In the Prussian system after 1848, the King had veto power over legislation and could dissolve parliament at any time. It was an illiberal system, and I don't want a return to anything similar - despite all liberal crises that exist.
If they gain further popularity, I guess we'll see how the lessons from the Weimar Constitution that went into building the Grundgesetz will hold up, and prevent them from remaking the state into what they envision.
There's a lot here I wish to comment on. But I suppose the distillation is that there is a strong difference between what you want, and what should be suppressed through force of government. Everything following is just commentary.
In the United Kingdom, the King currently has veto power over legislation (by withholding royal assent), and could dissolve parliament at any time (reclaiming the Royal Prerogative to do this after the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 was repealed in 2022). Does the United Kingdom have an illiberal system? Was the repeal of this act a slide towards Illiberal Totalitarianism? Is this state of affairs so horrendous that the United Kingdom needs to fear for its precious liberal democracy?
I view these as all silly worries. Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt are all mainstream in academic circles and have been since they were alive. They're sudden popularity among the ill defined New Right is mainly because things are going very poorly at the moment in ways that we were all promised as a society that they never would or could, and so people have to reach somewhere to find explanations and solutions. Whether these solutions are good or not, well, determining that is supposed to be part of the democratic process.
As to Prussia, well, I'll find it quite the task to make a good case why it was any worse than the monstrosity that exists now. The main issue is that in my opinion, the modern German government is a blight not just on the German people, but on all of Europe and the world. It is a joke in certain parts of the world that the German people just can't help themselves, they find a way to make any system awful given enough time. This is not because I hate "democracy" or "liberalism". This is because the German government has made a series of obviously extremely stupid decisions that have impacted itself, Europe, and the entire world.
I suppose the last comment I wish to make is that you fearing AfD is the point. Not by AfD. But by the current regime. Practically everything terrible happening now is a direct result of bad policy by those in charge. This is a global problem, but Germany is a main driver. Given this, it's very important to distract the people from this extremely obvious situation.
Suppose you're in charge of Germany and a political party comes along against basically all of your policies. The easiest thing to do is to find the craziest most socially unpalatable voices in that party, highlight them, and paint the entire party as that group. After all, when they're highlighted, more extreme supporters will come in. This makes your claims more and more reasonable through their own actions, not yours. We can compare this to successful gaslighting. Accuse them of being crazy long enough, and they might go crazy. Then you can say truly, ahah, they're crazy!
Though I would also say don't read too far into the analogy. AfD to me is just another typical European right party. Basically useless. They won't help anything, not because they're all waiting to enact the pogroms, but because their policy solutions are not very good and I don't think they'd know how to enact them even if they did manage to gain power. This however, does not mean they should be feared, or that the current parties in power are better.
Höcke outright says that he wants a "bloodletting" of those who don't agree with him:
"This is also where my fundamental confidence and serenity lie, beyond all horror scenarios. I am sure that - no matter how bad the circumstances may develop - in the end there will still be enough members of our people with whom we can open a new chapter in our history. Even if, unfortunately, we will lose a few sections of the people who are too weak or unwilling to resist the progressive Africanisation, Orientalisation and Islamisation. But apart from this possible bloodletting, we Germans have shown an extraordinary power of renovation in history after dramatic declines."
However bad the current government is, it doesn't want a bloddletting where all people that disagree with it are "lost".
That maybe overstates things a bit, but one example that immediately springs to mind here is that if you compare the rhetorical styles of Hitler and Fidel Castro, they had quite a lot in common, even if their ideas were quite different.
The original Antifa actually has its roots in the Germany of this era. It was originally a militant Communist group called Antifaschistische Aktion under the Communist party (KPD). Even then “fascists” were just everyone who wasn’t a communist, especially the moderate socialists.
From wikipedia “However, after The Communist International's abrupt ultra-left turn in its Third Period from 1928, the KPD regarded the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as its main adversary and adopted the position that the SPD was the main fascist party in Germany.[13] This was based on the theory of social fascism that had been proclaimed by Joseph Stalin and that was supported by the Comintern during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism.
…
During the Third Period, the KPD viewed the Nazi Party ambiguously. On one hand, the KPD considered the Nazi Party to be one of the fascist parties. On the other hand, the KPD sought to appeal to the Strasserite-wing of the Nazi movement by using nationalist slogans.[6] The KPD sometimes cooperated with the Nazis in attacking the SPD.[25] In 1931, the KPD had united with the Nazis, whom they referred to as "working people's comrades", in an unsuccessful attempt to bring down the SPD state government of Prussia by means of a referendum.”
On the other hand, it was the SPD (Gustav Noske) which used the Freikorps (basically the ancestor of the SA) against the KPD, resulting in the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and many others.
From the beginning, the Weimar republic succeeded due to a Faustian bargain with the ancien regime. The military, the bureaucracy, the courts, the police largely continued in the mentality of the Kaiserreich. While these forces were very willing to combat communists with brutal efficiency, they were either turning a blind eye to anti-republican activities from the right or outright complicit in them (e.g. Kapp-Putsch, murder of Erzberger).
For the moderate forces, this cooperation turned sour when Hitlers government decided to abolish personal freedoms (and democracy) and most of the state apparatus was totally ok with that.
At any rate it’s an essential bit of information. And it doesn’t make the SPD a ”fascist” party. In general communist revolutions are a bad idea (in my opinion).
Weimar Germany actually had a *centrist militia*, the Reichsbanner, that fought the Communists and Nazis.
Yeah, the Communists used to call the SPD 'social fascists' on the theory that there was *no difference* between them and actual fascists. They found out in 1933 they were really, really wrong.
In Weimar Germany, the Nazis and the Communists really were working in tandem. They each wanted to use violence and resentment to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and Christianity. Each strengthened the other, by scaring the center. They competed for members from the lumpenproletariat. But the German Communists had to obey Moscow, which was not in their own best interests.
"This was based on the theory of social fascism that had been proclaimed by Joseph Stalin and that was supported by the Comintern during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism."
Y'know, this finally explains to me how the online leftie warriors (and I don't mean your bog-standard Democrat voter) can call anything to the right "fascism". All Republicans and those who vote for them are fascists. If you think maybe giving drugs to twelve year olds is something we should consider deeply, you're a fascist. You think it might be less confusing to refer to Gessen as "her" not "they", in a sentence where you're trying to work out which 'they' means Gessen and which 'they' means 'the other group of people involved', you're a fascist.
I thought they were just using it as a boo-word, and very likely they are, but they can sincerely convince themselve "Joe who works in the box factory and votes R is a fascist" because they're following in their spiritual father's footsteps: social fascism is A Thing.
Given how cultured and educated you are Deiseach - and versed in Internet arguments going back as far as I can remember to boot - I'm surprised you haven't heard of "social fascism" tilll now. It seems like the sort of thing you can't dodge if you spend any time online interacting with "online leftie warriors". (And honestly, not even interacting with them, just existing in the same forum as them and having to scroll past what they say to everyone else). Like the stereotypical vegan or Crossfitter, the threat of 'social fascism' is very much a case of "they'll very much tell you about it, even if you didn't ask".
> We've already had the next twenty Hitlers, and they were all explicitly anti-fascist.
If you define a "Hitler" as someone who comes to power using the Hitler playbook (e.g. being democratically elected and then building a police state), I am not sure there are twenty instances of it happening.
If you define a "Hitler" as someone who gains power by whatever means and then enacts a police state, Pinochet would qualify, and he was not anti-fascist.
> Communism is a mild variation on Fascism
That is as useful to say as "sharks are a kind of tiger". If your audience has never heard of sharks, and you want to convey the idea that like tigers, sharks can sometimes prey on humans, it might be excusable. Given that the audience here has already a conception of both sharks and tigers, any such statement would just be trolling.
Ideology matters. While the early NSDAP did have an anti-capitalist bent, after the "Roehm-Putsch" it mostly let the industry be (provided they participated in the war effort and were not owned by Jews), which was the outcome the big donors of Hitler had hoped for.
Even if you eventually get a totalitarian dictator who is uninterested in ideology and just wants power as an end in itself, they will still be constrained by the ideology of their party. If archangel Gabriel appeared to Stalin in a dream and convinced him that private ownership of industry was beneficial, even he would not have had the power to completely rewrite the economy.
> And in the West we've mostly avoided dictators, but the groups most likely to be acting like brownshirts in the streets are the people who call themselves "Antifa".
Absolutely. Here in Germany, meeting of every moderate party are routinely broken up by uniformed paramilitaries of the Antifa with the police just standing by, watching. NOT.
Yeah, Hitler was toootally a lefty, just like Hirohito. Race warfare, Blut und Boden, extreme nationalism as well as antisemitism are after all core teachings of Karl Marx. I guess the German industry just financed Hitler because they were masochistic. </sarcasm>
While there were some anti-capitalist ideas in the early NSDAP, they stopped mattering much after the Nazis took power. The murders by the Nazis were fueled by right wing racist and nationalist ideology. No Collectivization like under Stalin.
I will grant you that Pinochet did not have a record-breaking death toll.
(Of course, the main morale of that list is that China really has a lot of population, and whoever murders in China will get into the top 3. I guess one could define a suckiness-index to measure how terrible any particular dictator is per subject-year (taking into account murders, terror, warfare and also long term effects like destroying the intelligentia or slowing economic development), but I think this is futile because we have forms of government which are better than both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships.)
Given the events of the quarter-century since he wrote, I don't think it's especially controversial to contend he was wrong. I certainly would - although I also don't expect another Hitler, in part because we still (at least half-)remember the example of the first one.
1. It would be difficult to find any other prediction in the humanities or social sciences that has proved more accurate. There are many more democratic countries than in 1989, and policy has become much more market-oriented in most countries.
2. When intellectuals discuss his prediction today, 99% assume it failed to come true. Indeed most utter the phrase “the end of history” with undisguised contempt."
Yeah, dumb of them. https://xkcd.com/1391/ 1989 was less than two generations ago. Pick forty years out of the history books and you'll likely find that hereditary monarchy is "the end of history", with no credible challengers. Being the strongest social science prediction simply states the weakness of social sciences.
Besides which, the next Hitler doesn't have to be credible in the long term. One article talks about how China has undermined itself 33 years into that prediction That's longer than the Nazy Party existed in its entirety.
One part of it is that Fukuyama's actual thesis is a bit more nuanced than the soundbite description usually makes it sound. As I understand it it's not that liberalism will always win in practice, but that there's no longer any credible ideological alternative to liberalism.
At first I though this was going to be a review of my favorite board game and I was dissappointed.
Anyway looking at your list of the keys to making a powerful "nazi" type party the only group that can even remotely do that in the US is the university elites and I seriously doubt they ever would given that they hold a lot of the soft power in gov already. (They do have the requisite money, ability to bully, they don't have a psuedo second state, though ESG money is closeish????? They are open about illiberalism(affirmative aciton Ect), though the time of crisis we had (COVID) has passed. So I feel like a hitler esk figure is extremely unlikely in the current climate and so I won't worry about it.
I definitely think this review was a bit long winded, part 4 was a really good part, and part 3 had too much info about things that didn't matter for the review.
I have fond memories of that game. I even have a copy lying around, but these days I don't think I have the sheer memory and attention to detail required to play it.
I actually do have a copy of that game, but I doubt I could find anyone willing to play it with me.
I am convinced there are real lessons about WW2 you would pick up from playing a good-enough simulation, but there are few people these days who would care enough to try. (Though a lot of the modern simulators like Europa Universalis probably do the job for you.)
according to people who fight real wars mass market games help a lot https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/wargaming-in-the-classroom-an-odyssey/ with understanding. I don't get the actual why very well, but there are some amazing anecdotes about people doing wild moves that make perfect sense from a historical perspective, or repeating the "mistakes" of history because other decisions were far worse.
Interesting! I thought having a lot of people recreationally wargaming might have an effect, and looks like it does! Thank you!
One of these days someone needs to write a book about the wargaming bubble of the seventies. I'm sure it had knock-on effects other than the creation of Dungeons & Dragons.
Well, why not list the oratory prowess? I'd maybe put that on point 1, rather than behind 5. A halfway-competent movement will eventually develop insights 1-5, but once-in-a-generation oratory prowess is what lets you actually generate the repeated attempts you need to learn your lessons.
Oratory prowess is a trainable skill. Hitler had talent, no doubt, but with professional training, a staff of speechwriters and a willingness to use pathos that will get mocked mercilessly, I think his speeches would be one of the easier parts of his formula to emulate.
Strongly disagree. Few people have it in them to be fantastic speakers. Today it isn't oratory -- which is more about speaking to an in-person gathering -- which matters so much as it is the ability to use modern media. Very few people have much talent speaking live on camera while knowing millions are watching. Most modern US presidents have had a preternatural ability to speak before a camera and project their charisma through it. Without that rare skill, one doesn't have much of a chance.
Clearly not or this would be much more common. In fact, as the review said, he would have not only not become leader of the Nazis if he didn’t have that oratory power, but he would have lost the leadership soon after.
Not that his oratory does anything fit me much, but my German isn’t great.
Oratory _competence_ is trainable. But true oratory talent, the kind that can regularly move large crowds of people to an almost religious frenzy, has a large and necessary "cannot-be-taught" component.
Among US politicians of the past quarter century I've personally witnessed two who fit that description and in both cases it was a key element of their electoral success: Obama and Trump.
The two of them could not be more different in too many ways to even list, including in their specific oratorical styles. But whether it moves you personally or not there is no denying that Trump's campaign rallies in 2016 -- consisting almost entirely of just him standing at a microphone for surprising lengths of time -- reached those packed crowds like few other things I've ever seen. And Obama in a completely different way could move thousands of people deeply and genuinely, I witnessed that firsthand too.
In place of "oratory" put "ability to manipulate the media". Trump had and has that. So does Antifa. The Left is extremely good at it by now, at "controlling the narrative" by using reporters as predictable puppets.
Hitler had Goebbels. He had a deep bench, actually, of very talented, totally unscrupulous people.
This was good. I still find that I literally don't understand the words being used in these stories though. In the very early days of the DAP, what actually were these "meetings"? I've never been to a "meeting" in my life, so I just don't have a picture of what it was.
When Hitler went fundraising, how did he do it? Was it drunken old aristocratic lechers sitting in great drawing rooms, happy to have a nice young man listen to and agree with their tedious rants about how it was all the jews' fault, and then just writing him a cheque for a thousand deutschmarks?
And those four hour speeches - does anyone listen to a person speaking for four hours? Don't they need the toilet?
Perhaps these are all inconsequential gaps in my personal knowledge. But I still feel like this review has helped, but not quite answered the questions it set out to.
As to the four hour speeches—such things were not uncommon in Days Gone By. In nineteenth century America is was certainly common for preachers’ sermons to last that long or even longer, every single week. I imagine in a beer hall you have more freedom to excuse yourself than you do in the pews!
All the meetings I've been to in my life have been *for* something - "we're meeting with the client to gather requirements for this project" or "this meeting is to draw up a plan for the fundraiser next month." So saying someone made speeches at party meetings gives me the rather odd mental image of someone interrupting a boring logistical discussion to make an impassioned speech about democracy.
I assume what they actually mean is a social event - "meet and have a beer with your local party members." But we don't usually call that a "meeting."
I do wonder about the community here sometimes. Nazi conferences were often staged in a beer hall so drink was taken, but that doesn’t stop it being a meeting. And other meetings were in more formal settings.
Scott sets up meetings and some of them are in bars and some of them have large groups and others have as low as two. And that’s all meetings. (There’s one where only one guy showed up but that’s a guy, not a meeting).
anyway you can drink at meetings.
There is little to wonder about here, Hitler talking at a meeting of the party is like trump or Biden talking at their respective conventions. Or it’s like a CEO speaking at an All Hands. The presence of booze is neither here, nor there.
Yeah, I've been wondering about those meet-ups, in connection with someone known for verbal ability.
Perhaps as a variant of rationalist training, some of us should "adopt" particular Cabinet positions and propose more sane alternatives to the policies of the current administration. Sort of the way UK political parties do it. It would help with training good decision-making and provide accountability.
I mean, you can *call* the ACX meetups "rationalist meetings", it's a perfectly valid usage of the word, I'm just saying it might get you a few confused looks because it's not a common phrasing. And that maybe you shouldn't react to the confusion with "are you unaware of the concept of a meeting?"
I suppose you are a person giving confused looks, but I don't think calling an ACX meeting a "meeting" is an uncommon phrasing. What would a "meetup" be other than a "meeting"? I honestly can't think of a way a "meetup" could be anything else.
You've never been to a big meeting of the such-and-such society? A bunch of people mill around chatting, then one or more people give talks, then there's some questions from the audience, then the meeting ends and people mill around chatting some more? This is what political party meetings look like all across the world, and I imagine that early NSDAP meetings were pretty much the same (with the added bonus that you could drink during the meeting instead of waiting until afterwards).
That's actually helpful. I have been to a few meetings like that. I guess what's confusing me is what they talked about, seeing as I don't understand local politics, much less German local politics in the 1920s. But they must have had a bunch of local issues to discuss, like occupational licensing, regulations on hours and apprenticeships, rules on conscription... OK, yeah, I'm starting to see it now.
Yeah I think that one thing that is lacking in this review and in most discussions of the NSDAP is what their policies on things actually were. One might get the impression from our popular conception of the Nazi Party that their whole policy was "be evil, lol".
Reading the NSDAP's "25 point plan" starts to give some idea of what the party was really all about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program ... it's definitely a combination of the sort of German nationalism that would eventually get them into trouble alongside a bunch of FDR-style economic leftism and some interesting points whose underlying context I don't understand. Interesting to see the Nazis demanding common law, given how few other British things they seemed to be keen on.
This is part of what confuses me. At this point, early 1920, they'd got an official name and official membership, but they didn't have any appointments - no one in parliament, no affiliated mayors or even town councilmen, so far as I can see.
What gives an "organisation" in this state the chutzpah to "demand" things like a sweeping change of the legal system of the entire nation? There's an element of crazy there which is... bracing and interesting, but also fairly easy to spot.
Also, Hitler was assigned to watch this party, took it over and turned revolutionary? So, just like the movie The Day Shall Come, then?
The social element is also to get ordinary people to come along: "Come to the meeting in the local pub, listen to us explain what we're all about, and sign up if you like the cut of our jib. Even if you don't, at least you can have a few beers and be entertained".
Think of the kind of political meeting as described by Chesterton in his autobiography:
"One [member of the Republican Club at Oxford] was John Swinnerton Phillimore, son of the old Admiral whose name made a sort of background for the Kensington of my boyhood, afterwards Latin Professor at Glasgow University and one of the first classical authorities of his time...But John Phillimore, as things fell out, had to be a rather unique sort of don; and at once a popular and a pugnacious professor. You could not conduct classes amid the racial and religious chaos of Glasgow, full of wild Highlanders and wild Irish, and young fanatical Communists and old fanatical Calvinists, without possessing some of the qualities of the quarter-deck. Most of the stories about Phillimore read like tales of mutiny on the high seas. It was shrewdly said of him that the effect of the word "gentlemen," as said by him, was like the famous effect of the word "Quirites!", as said by Caesar. On a similar occasion an insubordinate but intelligent Glasgow crowd seems to have instantly grasped the gratifying irony of his appeal, "Gentlemen, gentlemen! I have not yet ceased casting my pearls."
...Now I thought I knew all about Revolutionists long before I met the representative of the Republican Club. I had talked to them in dirty taverns or untidy studios, or more depressing vegetarian hostels. I knew there were differences in cut and colour; and that some were more really revolutionary than others. I knew that some wore pale green neckties and gave lectures on decorative art; while some wore red neckties and made speeches on Trade Union platforms. I have sung "The Red Flag" in hearty chorus with the latter, and William Morris's "England, Awake" in more refined accents with the former. And though I knew nothing of the comparison with another method, I did more and more realise, with an ever sinking heart, that for some reason we had not got a decent revolutionary song to our name; and that in the matter of producing any respectable sort of Hymn of Hate, my countrymen were a washout.
One weakness of these popular war-songs was that they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn. "England awake; the long long night is over; faint in the east behold the dawn appear." They were all like that; they were all Songs Before Sunrise; as if the sun that rose on the just and the unjust did not also rise on the conquered and the conqueror. But the English revolutionary poet wrote as if he owned the sun and was certain to be the conqueror. In other words, I found that the Socialist idea of war was exactly like the Imperialist idea of war; and I was strengthened and deepened in my detestation of both of them. I have heard many arguments against the idea of a Class War; but the argument which discredits it for me is the fact that the Socialists, like the Imperialists, always assumed that they would win the war. I am no Fascist; but the March on Rome gave them the surprise they needed. To say the least, it considerably halted the inevitable proletarian triumph; just as the Boers had halted the inevitable British triumph. And I do not like inevitable triumphs. Also I do not believe in them. I do not think that any social solution, even a more manly one like that of Morris, should be called "as sure as that tomorrow's sun will rise.""
This kind of political meeting:
"These two voices of Belloc, so to speak, were so distinct that he could sometimes pass from one to the other and make it seem like two persons speaking; effecting a transition on a platform almost as dramatic as the dialogue of a ventriloquist with his doll. When he stood as a Liberal member for Salford, he often managed to bewilder his hecklers by spraying them with these sharply alternated showers of cold and hot water. Salford was a poor and popular constituency, in which there were many strata of simple and provincial people, retaining the prejudices of our great-grandfathers; one of them being the touching belief that anybody with a French name could be made to cower and grovel by any allusion to the Battle of Waterloo. This was probably the only battle of which the heckler himself had ever heard; and his information about it was limited to the partly inaccurate statement that it was won by the English. He therefore used to call out at intervals, "Who won Waterloo?" And Belloc would affect to take this with grave exactitude, as a technical question put to him upon a tactical problem, and would reply with the laborious lucidity of a lecturer, "The issue of Waterloo was ultimately determined, chiefly by Colborne's manoeuvre in the centre, supported by the effects of Van der Smitzen's battery earlier in the engagement. The Prussian failure in synchrony was not sufficiently extensive, etc." And then, while the unfortunate patriot in the audience was still endeavouring to grapple with this unexpected growth of complexity in the problem he had propounded, Belloc would suddenly change his own note to the ringing directness of the demagogue, would openly boast of the blood of that Pyrenean soldier who had followed the revolutionary army of Napoleon, and risen in its ranks, through all the victories that established a code of justice all over a continent and restored citizenship to civilisation. "It is good democratic blood; and I am not ashamed of it."
This transition of tone had a tremendous effect, the whole hall rose at him roaring with applause and the investigator of the Belgian campaign was left isolated."
Or this:
"Nobody ever did it better, when he chose, than old John Burns, for whom I have spoken and voted so often in the days when I lived in Battersea. To mention one case, as a sort of model; it was natural enough that the old Dock-Strike agitator, having become a Cabinet Minister and in many ways a rather Conservative force, should be assailed by more revolutionary groups as an extinct volcano if not a surrendered fortress. But Burns knew how to deal with that sort of thing when speaking to democrats; by cutting deeper into human facts instead of sliding away upon legal fictions. He was taunted by some Socialists at a Battersea meeting with not having opposed the Royal Grant to Queen Mary or some princess at the celebrations on the appearance of an heir. I can imagine how the smoother sort of Lib-Lab social climber, passing through Parliament into the governing class, would explain away his position in terms of the etiquette of the House. John Burns said, "I am the son of my mother and the husband of my wife. And if you ask me to put a public insult upon a woman who has just borne a child, I will not do it." That is English rhetoric: and it is as good as any in the world."
Damn it, now I'm distracted off the main subject, but yeah: I think Chesterton is right here when we talk about UBI and what it might be in effect, rather than theory:
"The thesis of the book is that the Socialist movement does not lead to Socialism. This is partly because of compromise and cowardice; but partly also because men have a dim indestructible respect for property, even in its disgusting disguise of modern monopoly. Therefore, instead of the intentional result, Socialism, we shall have the unintentional resultant: Slavery. The compromise will take the form of saying, "We must feed the poor; we won't rob the rich; so we will tell the rich to feed the poor, handing them over to be the permanent servants of a master-class, to be maintained whether they are working or no, and in return for that complete maintenance giving a complete obedience." All this, or the beginnings of it, can be seen in a hundred modern changes, from such things as Insurance Acts, which divide citizens by law into two classes of masters and servants, to all sorts of proposals for preventing strikes and lock-outs by compulsory arbitration. Any law that sends a man back to his work, when he wants to leave it, is in plain fact a Fugitive Slave Law."
Great review. I think, from your account, Shirer underestimates the seriousness of the threat of Soviet Russia, and the extent to which it explains support of Hitler without having to reach for clichés about Germans being keen on being told what to do. Stalin would have killed millions of Germans if given half a chance, and at least some of the shock about the rise of Hitler stems from a Western-centric worldview - if France had been ruled by a genocidal lunatic, and then Germany had followed suit, there would have been much less of a feeling that this was an extraordinary event that required a vast amount of chin stroking.
Which also makes modern American (or indeed general developed world) concerns about dictatorship seem overblown. If the rise of a dictator requires a realistic threat from an insanely evil external enemy, we'll probably be fine until the robot apocalypse engulfs us all.
(And, as a thought experiment, if the robot apocalypse is surprisingly slow moving, wouldn't a lot of his most committed enemies vote for dictator Musk, even if he was running on a platform of "I am evil and I will destroy [ethnic group], but I am the only person with any chance of defeating the robots"?)
I think part of the point is "Notice here that it doesn’t matter whether there’s “objectively” a crisis—Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. As long as Things Can’t Go On, it’s a good time for Hitlers."
Things in Germany aren't objectively catastrophic right now - and still people flock to the right wing extremist party, because it succeeds at painting a picture where the elites don't care about them and aren't able and willing to solve problems.
I'm not so sure about a "largely fictitious Communist revolution" - Marx had expected it to happen in industrialised Germany, not Russia, after all. And the shock of the Russian Revolution probably was still overhanging everything - who would have believed that a bunch of rabblerousers could get the entire vast Russian empire behind them and end up executing the royal family, with the rest of the monarchs of Europe (their blood relations) doing sweet damn-all about it because, uh, politics?
If it could happen there, why not here? I imagine a fair few people thinking. After all, the end of the war had forced the end of the monarchies as well; from the new 'democratic republic' states to full-blown Communist revolution must not have seemed like that giant a step.
Why do you say that Hitler used the danger and blew it out of proportion rather than "Hitler sincerely believed in the danger, and took extreme actions to stop it"?
There seems to be a temptation to attribute insincerity to Hitler's actions.
Well, maybe I would have judged differently in 1933 - but knowing the outcome, it seems pretty clear that this wasn't *about* communism, it was about building the state he envisioned already in 1925 (as quoted in the review).
In 1932, Hitler stopped talked about Jews much, and started talking about Communists instead. That's what he had to do to increase his vote share and not look like a nutjob. After 1934, when he was in power solidly, he went back to talking about Jews and proved that he *was* a nutjob. See https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
Sure, but there's a difference between "There was no chance at all of aliens landing in Bavaria and Hitler only whipped up fake fears" and "A flying saucer had been witnessed landing on the village green and Hitler used public alarm to the benefit of his party".
You have to account for "Why did Germans supporth Hitler?" and if people had reasonable fears that makes it easier. If the average Johann in the street was worried about the Communists because they'd been going around beating people up and smashing windows, that makes him more likely to be sympathetic to "Well I don't agree completely with this guy but he's right about the Communists", whereas it's much more difficult when it's "The Communists are just harmless charity workers".
In Germany in the years leading up to 1933, both the Communists and Nazis were sponsoring street-fighting, which the order-loving German public found intolerable. Occasionally, the Communists and Nazis brawlers would cooperate against more centrist forces of law and order. (Up until 1934's Popular Front, Stalin felt the main foreign enemy that his Anti-Fascists should be attacking were the "social fascist" Social Democratic Party of Germany, who were, to a rough approximation, the Good Guys in Germany.)
In England, with its more well-developed sense of humor, these Nazi-Communist riots would have led to "a plague on both your houses" attitude. (A generation later, the classic reactions of English rockers to late 1960s leftist political street-fighting was disapproving irony: see the Beatles' "Revolution," the Stones' "Street Fighting Man," and the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." And The Kinks were so conservative that they didn't even have a hit in this genre.)
But in more tightly wound Germany, Hitler was able to manage to persuade a large fraction of Germans that the solution to fighting in the streets was to put one set of street-fighters in charge.
Was Shirer part-German-American? He was a bourgeois Midwesterner, born in Chicago, raised in Iowa. For Midwesterners of his generation, the more impressive performance of Brits over Germans had personal ramifications.
This is really profound. It's the Germans' total inability to operate on the basis of irony which is responsible for all of this. It's not that they're servile: it's that they don't know how to wink, and as a result, they will fall head over heels for an ideologue who convinces them that he has logic on his side.
To be fair, "because, uh, politics" includes the end and aftermath of WWI, which may have had a negative effect on said monarchs' willingness to pursue a vigorous foreign policy.
There was a Communist uprising in Germany after the First World War, the Sparticus revolt. And the Communist party was responsible for violence after that, they had their own paramilitary wing. The later leader of East Germany Ulbricht and future leader of Stasi Mielke, of the Communist party, were ordering policemen assassinated in 1931. And as the review mentioned, at times the Communists apparently cooperated with the Nazis because they felt their real enemy were the moderates.
Moreover, the 1918 German Revolution started out largely Marxist in character, until the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) leadership got out in front of it and redirected it towards establishing the liberal Weimar Republic, through a combination of persuasion (pre-1918 the lines between the SPD and German Marxism were a bit blurry, making it easy for SPD leaders in the Reichstag to claim leadership of the revolution), feit accompli, and the backing of the German military leadership (who vastly preferred an SPD-lead liberal republic over a completed Soviet-style Communist revolution).
The Spartacist revolt, as I understand it, came out of a split between the SPD on one hand (which wanted and got a liberal democracy) and committed Marxists on the other hand (who wanted a full Soviet-style revolution), with the latter deciding to resume trying to have a full Communist revolution whether the SPD was on board or not.
Communists had taken power in parts of Germany before. In fact Hitler was in bavaria during the month long Soviet there (not mentioned in this review).
It’s actually not quite clear what he was doing - he was still in the army at the time.
I've read both Rise and Fall and Shirer late book about France, "The Collapse of the Third Republic", and I found underestimating the evils of Soviet Communism to be a major blind spot of his. I read him as being somewhere on the leftward side of the liberal political spectrum, most likely a New Deal Democrat with Social Democratic sympathies.
Like many inhabitants of that part of the political spectrum in the early-to-mid 20th century, Shirer seems to have viewed revolutionary Marxists as being more-or-less on the same side despite differences of degree and preferred tactics. He did recognize some of the flaws and evils of Stalin's regime in particular, but nevertheless downplayed and excused them to a degree, and the evils he did recognize he mostly compartmentalized specifically to Stalinism rather than seeing them as emblematic of more general flaws with revolutionary leftism in general, Marxism in particular, or even with the non-Stalinist elements of the Bolsheviks.
Shirer was pretty similar politically to his fellow journalistic bestselling author Theodore White, author of the "Making of the President" series, who spent much of WWII hanging out as a reporter for "Time" with future Chinese Communist Party foreign minister Chou En-lai (now Zhou). Just as Shirer was fired by William Paley of CBS in 1947, White parted company in the 1940s with Henry Luce of Time.
In his memoirs, White talked about how the Communists invading South Korea in 1950 came as a big shock and embarrassment to him as an anti-anti-Communist. I'm not sure that Shirer ever admitted to that.
I enjoyed the Hilters. Maybe they made the writing feel more organic, or maybe I finally experienced the thrill the other side feels when misgendering or deadnaming their enemies.
Ironically, the name Hitler itself was the product of a clerical error.
I think someone else in the comments scooped me on this, but as the story goes, in the process of altering the birth certificate of Hitler's father Alois (to legitimise Alois as the son of Johann Georg Hiedler), Johann Georg's surname on Alois's certificate was mis-written as Hitler.
I don't think it was ever fully clarified which one of the Hiedler brothers was de facto Alois's biological father. Maria Schicklgruber was, by local accounts, fond of both.
Seeing that Schicklgruber last name reminds me also of a really funny part of Shirer’s book: he ponders fate and whether history would have turned out quite the same if that would have turned his last name. After all ‘Heil Schicklbruber’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.
> There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schicklgruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional “Hello.” “Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine.*
I don't have a native ear for German, but hindsight bias is powerful: perhaps we'd see Schicklgruber as much more menacing than we do now, maybe even wondering how Schicklgruber could have become the master of Germany without the fearsome one-two punch of the stressed syllables, having to make do with the curt and timid 'Hitler'; or perhaps (as Eric Rasmusen suggests) he'd have chosen a different name for himself sometime during his ascent.
Does anyone else feel like Scott wrote this one, based off the opening section? I know the fan favorite right now is that he wrote the Njal's Saga one, judging by the Manifold prediction market*... but I can't help but feel that the opening section of this one sounds *so much like Scott*, this one should at least be in the runnings for "the one written by Scott".
I trust Scott when he says he didn't write any of the finalist entries. If we're not going to believe that, then there isn't much point in having a book review contest in the first place, he can just put up his own reviews as and when he likes.
Hmm, but this time he very deliberately *didn't* say he was staying out of the contest:
"Last year people kept guessing that various reviews were by me, and I had to reassure you that no, I hadn’t secretly entered my own contest. This year I refuse to confirm or deny anything, so have fun speculating!"
Actually, there's another possibility: that Scott takes what he thinks is a good book review and gives it a good two-hour stylistic edit before showing it to us.
The intro was written well enough for an ACX-review (I. and II.), the remainder underwhelming. And kinda lazy: Ok, Scott has read only one book about Putin, it seems, but this is HITLER and just one ooold book and the author claims to be ignorant about more recent historiography. And the content shows: he/she is.
Scott never writes book reviews that can be described as mostly a synopsis. His reviews invariably interweave synopsis with his thoughts about the topic. I think we can be confident that Scott did *not* write this one (unless he was actually trying to be misleading, & trix like that are not his style).
Interesting look at how it happened. It does bring up all the alternate history speculations: did it have to be Hitler? By this, yes it did. So what would have happened if he had been killed during the First World War?
Or if the Axis Powers had won the First World War, would there have been a Hitler? Sure, he might have gone off and got tangled up in politics, but he might have remained a small time demagogue because Germany and Austria would still have had their monarchies and their empires, and the balance of power would have been different in Europe. Things would not have been the same when the Great Depression hit - there would have been no ready-made "I'll overturn the Treaty of Versailles extortion and Make Germany Great Again" platform.
> He found ‘Hiedler’ . . . too soft; but ‘Hitler’ sounded nice and was easy to remember.
As I understand it, "Hiedler" and "Hitler" sound exactly the same in German. As you mentioned, "Hitler" was a misspelling. So how can one sound nicer than the other?
It looks like Adolf would have grown up in an area speaking Central Bavarian, part of High German. I know nothing of these dialects, but Wikipedia suggests that one of the features of "Central" Bavarian is voicing of consonants, meaning "Hitler" might come out "Hidler". And I have no idea what the vowel shifts might be...
The Man met The Moment. Or, rather, The Men. Goering and Goebbels were very smart, and maybe even more important than Hitler in The Moment of 1932-1933, though Hitler was the man with the guts to take the necessary risks. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
I wondered how he could have been stopped and identified basically 2 big moments:
1. His 5 year sentence (which was supposed to be life) was reduced to 9 months. Maybe when officials pass laws like "treason gets you life" they do it to signal how tough they are, while still knowing that no one will actually serve life. Alternatively, it could be possible that the people in charge of the courts optimize for shorter sentences and don't mind flouting or stretching the rules. I'm of the unpopular opinion that if someone holds a ton of people up at gunpoint, they should be in prison for decades if not life, but I understand that not a lot of people agree with that, so I don't think that's a viable anti-Hitler path.
2. Forming a coalition to stop him from getting the votes. If you recognized that Hitler is a unique threat, you would have to briefly set aside your differences and secure a majority, then ban the Nazi party and jail him for the various crimes he committed, this time for life, or disappear him if possible. The 3 biggest complications with this plan is if a) the differences are too great to set aside, b) Hitler is not seen as a unique threat worth doing this for, and c) for some reason you are not able to exercise your power to stop him when you do form a coalition.
This episode comes across as an unstoppable force (Hitler) meets a very flimsy object. I view their inability to imprison him or execute him for treason to be downstream of their inability to form a coalition - everyone just had weakly held pro-liberal beliefs and viewed any attempt at upholding the law or building a majority coalition as Just Not Worth It. They simply didn't care about liberal democracy enough and when economic strife hit it was waiting to be overthrown.
The problem with #2 was that the Nazis and the KPD (the Communist Party of Germany) between the two of them held a majority of the seats in the Reichstag (296 out of 584 seats). There was no way to get a majority without one or the other of them, or at least picking off a faction of one of them. It didn't help that the rest of the Reichstag was split between 11 different parties. There were three major ones: the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, and the DNVP (a coalition of monarchist conservatives and non-Nazi militarist nationalists, with the latter firmly in the driver's seat by 1932). Then there were a couple of splinter parties with 10-20 seats each (the BVP, which split off of the Center Party, and the DVP which was a former major party (a somewhat more classical-liberal counterpart to the DNVP) but had lost most of its support in recent years), and a long tail of fringe parties with 1-5 seats.
While the Nazis and the KPD were mortal enemies, the had a couple things in common. Both had strong internal party discipline, both had explicit goals of ending Weimar democracy, and both parties' leaderships had made a strategic decision to oppose any government they didn't lead.
Good points. A major takeaway from Hitler's rise to power is that it is also important how those you are up against, act. If they cannot agree among themselves, show weak leadership, and constantly shoot themselves (and each other) in the foot, your odds of success increase.
Such weaknesses among Hitler's many opponents were a major factor behind his initial successes - both nationally and internationally. Sure, he was a ruthless and intelligent politician with good organizing skills and the gift of the gab, but the context he operated in is perhaps the main factor behind his rise to absolute power, plus that he came quite close to dominate Europe and the world. Worth noticing if one attempts to draw lessons for the future from this and other rise-of-dictator stories.
The court system in the Weimar republic was basically the same as in the monarchy. It is generally described as "blind on the right eye". Crimes which would earn a communist the gallows would earn a right wing actor a year of Festungshaft, even if the courts had to disobey the letters of the law to do so.
Stopping the NSDAP by making it illegal is not easily done. First, state repression was kind of frowned upon. The SPD was banned by Bismarks Sozialistengesetz (1878-1890), and it was likely not a fan of such measures.
When the NSDAP entered the stage, it was by no means an unique threat to the Weimar republic. Plenty of groups from the far left and far right were openly opposed to parliamentary democracy. I think the Weimar strategy was to generally offer all of them political participation because the alternative would be more violent uprisings (like the Kapp-Putsch).
As the NSDAP was gaining a larger share of the vote, banning them would have meant risking open conflict. Given that the army, courts and police were unreliable in their defense of liberal democracy at the best of times, who should enforce such a ban?
I also do not think that the Communists would have voted for a ban of the Nazis, because it would create precedent for banning the KPD, which would be the obvious next step.
I am not sure that banning parties is generally a successful strategy within liberal democracies. The federal republic of Germany banned the KPD and some party which was obviously meant to be a successor of the NSDAP, but I think this was at best a cosmetic operation like banning the swastika. Banning the AFD (which polls at ~20%) is not something anyone seriously considers, nor would I think it appropriate.
The banning part is mostly due to their leader being a maniac and violating the law. I don’t follow current German politics, but the AfD probably doesn’t break the law or represent a fascist threat like the Nazi party did. If the leaders of the AfD were engaged in trying to set up an independent republic inside of Germany, or they used force and fought other parties in the streets then banning them could be justified.
Not bad, not a winner. Two nits to pick: A) Hitler as the "7th-member´" of the DAP - is Hitler's fabrication, (he was 55th, his number "555"; the DAP started the count at "501" to look less tiny). As are some other details. - B) The votes of the catholic "Zentrum" were needed , and there was a lot of pressure+promises - Hitler got the Vatican also to sign the first international agreement with the new regime ( wikipedia: "Reichskonkordat" ) - but their "Yes" was not that enigmatic: The then tiny democratic-liberal party agreed, too. (One of them became 1949 the first president of West-Germany, Theodor Heuss.) Though their votes were not needed. After all, there was SA with guns in the hall. Btw: See 2014 in the Crimean parliament voting for a "referendum". - I do agree with "do not call them Hitler", I disagree with "open about their illiberalism": Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Putin - all stick to their "we are flawless democrats, of course", as does LePen or AfD.
It seems a bit unfair to ding Shirer for "his prejudice against...the supposed gullibility and servility of the German people", given that the actual history involves a huge swath of the population--including much of its elite--openly voting for and supporting a man who, by the reviewer's own admission, was spectacularly open about wanting to become the nation's totalitarian dictator. Say what you like about Hitler's organizational savvy, rhetorical skills and political acumen--the public clearly knew what he was selling, and they were buying in droves. (*Why* they were so enthusiastic about autocracy is perhaps an interesting cultural/historical question to debate, but Shirer was clearly correct in observing that they were so--just as they were unquestionably in deep sympathy with Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism.) Surely, then, "they have the support of (much of) the public, at least at first" belongs *somewhere* on the list of attributes of successful dictators, no?
Why does support for totalitarianism have to imply gullibility? I mean, obviously nowadays it would, but back then, democracy seemed quite weak and impotent
This comment section in general has shown a disturbing lack of awareness that we're looking back on this with almost a century of hindsight.
When your democracy is as weak as Weimar Germany's was, and communism is on the march, I can empathize with people who are desperate for an alternative. We can look back now and say that the cure was worse than the disease, but that wasn't necessarily obvious in the moment.
Shirer didn't have almost a century of hindsight--he was simply an American raised in a relatively freedom-respecting democracy who found it shocking and appalling that an entire nation embraced a fanatical tyrant and begged him to rule over them autocratically while sending them off to a ruinous war of conquest. Now, one could fault him for coddled naivete--he was evidently unaware that eager embrace of tyrannical fanaticism was a sentiment hardly confined to prewar Germany--but I don't see how one can fault his basic diagnosis: that in the end, Germans got the monstrous dictator they wanted, a monstrous dictator that they almost certainly wouldn't have gotten if they hadn't very much wanted him. Surely that belongs among the lessons of the rise of Nazism--no? Are we to believe that a society's collective preference for brutal autocracy over liberal democracy has no correlation with its tendency to end up ruled by brutal autocrats?
For a lot of this I found myself irresistibly drawn to parallels with Alexander Hamilton, another brash young people-pleasing orator ("let's get this guy in front of a crowd!") who'd be key to a revolution. To the extent that I was imagining the Broadway-style songs, the staging of the scenes set in parliament and the one set in prison, the brief scenes showing the national populace's fears and feelings, and so on.
Are there any major films or stage shows depicting the rise of Hitler? I feel like it could be done in a quite compelling way without at all endorsing him: similar to Star Wars episodes 2-3.
There's a movie from the early 2000s called "Max" about Hitler in 1919 as he's deciding between a career in art and in politics. John Cusack plays Max, a wealthy Jewish art dealer who thinks this Hitler kid just might have that special something it takes to get to the top of the modern art world. But Hitler decides that being dictator is more suitable for a Wagnerian total artist such as himself.
I presume the movie is largely fictional. It seems more like a Philosophy of Art exercise than actual history.
There was a 3 hour miniseries in 2003 called "Hitler-The Rise of Evil" that covers the historical record 1914-1934. The biggest name in the cast is Peter O'Toole as von Hindenburg. Robert Carlyle played Hitler.
There have probably been a number of other Young Hitler TV shows over the years.
I hurried up publishing my Substack on Hitler 1932-1933 when I saw this review. My take on Lessons is different. It's not "you need money to take over", but "you need guts, good strategists, and edgy but legal tricks to take over".
> What does it take to be literally Hitler? ... You remember Godwin’s law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia.
What if this is just fundamentally the wrong question? What if pattern-matching onto a singular historical episode is a fixation based on psychological trauma rather than a good way to navigate away from bad outcomes?
A good question to ask about all such comparisons: how well would the early Lenin or Mao map onto the thing I'm worrying about? If the thing matches Lenin and Mao, but not Hitler, am I deriving false comfort from the fact that it's "not Hitler?" Because those guys did plenty of mass murder, too.
Conversely, if the thing matches surface-level characteristics of Hitler (e.g., "displays swastikas") but absolutely none of the characteristics of "actually gains state power," am I freaking out about the equivalent of a hippie burning an American flag, i.e., a deliberate but empty provocation?
I think part of it is that there's a fair chunk of people who don't group Lenin and Mao with Hitler, and instead reference Franco and Mussolini. Hitler's the only one pretty much every agrees on.
But that's exactly part of the problem I'm pointing to, right? That people are strongly indexing on cultural elements that don't actually correlate with, you know, mass murder.
To spell that point out: Lenin and Mao committed far more mass murder than Franco or Mussolini, and yet people's indexing doesn't reflect that.
Well, perhaps they think some goals are worth the cost? Or perhaps they score highly on that "loyalty" axis, and don't want to call attention to the faults of people who, in some sense, are "on their side"? Or worst, maybe they think Lenin and Mao did nothing wrong.
I suppose they could think any of those things. But then, they would have zero moral high-ground. They would not actually be against mass murder, just when it's not for "their side." In which case, I have no interest in helping them figure whom they should be "worrying about."
Lenin and Mao also gave real, material benefits to broad swaths of the population for whom liberal "democracy" (I doubt that there really is such a thing, given the degree to which money controls politics) offers nothing but wage slavery
As a side note, the current standard recommendation for an up-to-date academically rigorous political history of Nazi Germany is Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy: "The Coming of the Third Reich" (up through 1933), "The Third Reich in Power" (1933-1939), and "The Third Reich at War" (1939-1945)
I must say, based on this description, there is at least one current developed-world political figure who reminds me a lot of 1920s Hitler. Openly illiberal as well as viciously racist, a strategically brawling thug happy to use violence to enhance his political appeal, thriving on crisis, skilled at increasing his power through aggressive negotiation with more traditional rightists who half-agree with him and think they can use him.
That figure is Itamar ben Gvir. If this review causes one change in how this blog's readership does contemporary politics, I hope it is to strengthen their support of the present Israeli protest movement, and to give more credence to those who analogize Otzma Yehudit to the NSDAP.
The most serious criticism levelled against him by his enemies is that he prayed at a location that Jews aren't allowed to. That strikes me as less "Hitler," and more "American Civil rights leader."
"On some critical issues, Otzma Yehudit appears to have staked positions even more extreme than the far-right parties troubling Europe, though Israel’s unique milieu limit direct comparisons... even the AfD does not advocate for the emigration of ethnic minority German citizens and the establishment of a government ministry to facilitate it, as Ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit do for Arab citizens of Israel." (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvirs-policy-goals-going-to-extremes-even-europes-far-right-wont-touch/)
"For decades, Ben Gvir was a political untouchable. His roots in the overtly racist Kach party — founded by a radical American rabbi, Meir Kahane, and banned by Israel — put him beyond the fringe of even the most right-wing parties." (WaPo article)
"Just three years ago, Netanyahu’s decision to cut a deal that could have resulted in him [Ben-Gvir] entering the Knesset was so alarming that even the normally tight-lipped pro-Israel lobby AIPAC weighed in against it. By early 2021, the Likud leader was courting Ben Gvir’s support for his right-religious alliance, while also branding him as “not fit” for ministerial office." (Times of Israel article)
These quotes, and especially that last one, have a few similarities to something I read recently. A book review, perhaps.
He's also spent a lot of time doing organizational work for domestic terrorists (e.g. driving a bunch of teenagers to an arab village and telling them to go do some property damage). He's had like eighteen investigations into him by shin bet (who are not, as a rule, particularly into investigating Jewish terrorism).
Ben-Gvir himself matches this but I don't think the rest of the situation does. There's not the same level of crisis as 1920s Germany (granted, this could change), and Netanyahu is much better than Hindenberg at siphoning off populist-right energy into (admittedly somewhat antiliberal) mainstream right (although if Netanyahu dies or retires, that leaves a power vacuum I can imagine Ben Gvir jumping into).
"Germans who mistakenly thought the communists were the real threat ultimately played into Hitler’s hand. "
"Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. "
How do we know that the Germans weren't right, and that if Hitler didn't win, the communists would? How do we know that the communists wouldn't have been even worse for Germany? Germany already had a failed communist revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_October
"This isn’t to say that Hitler never lied. He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions, after all."
Hitler may not have had much in socialist intentions, but the party absolutely did. As the review mentions, Strasser took the socialist part of national socialism very seriously. So did Röhm, leader of the SA, who kept calling for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth. It's partially for his socialism that Hitler got rid of him on the Night of the Long Knives.
Yes, he seems to be asking exactly that question, and honestly I'm interested in the answer as well. If there's one thing studying history is convinced me, it's that the horrors of World War II were caused by a combination of Hitler and the circumstances of germany, and that it would have been fairly easy to swap somebody else into Hitler's position. You probably wouldn't have gotten the holocaust, but you definitely still would have gotten the war.
I'm not so sure. The idea of picking a fight with the entirety of Europe at once doesn't make a lot of sense unless you're hopped up on fascist "we're so manly that one of our soldiers is worth ten of theirs" nonsense. And I don't think that fascism in particular was inevitable, even if the Weimar government was doomed.
It's possible that a non-fascist government would still have gone to war, since lots of governments have tried for a "short victorious war" to solve their problems, but even then I'm not sure it was inevitable for that war to spread to all of Europe.
Trotsky believed in lighting the whole world on fire with socialist revolution. Had he beaten "socialism in one country" Stalin, it's easily possible that the USSR would have been even more aggressive and imperialistic than it already was, which is saying a lot because it was already one of the most aggressive and imperialistic powers in history. Now imagine if Trotsky, instead of being the head of backwards Russia, was the dictator of the far more technologically and economically advanced Germany.
Putting "whether or not they would've been worse" aside, do you think that, without Hitler and the Nazi party, the Communist party had the means to take over Germany?
It's hard to tell. Nearly nobody, not even most members of the Bolsheviks' Central Committee, thought the Bolsheviks had the means to take over Russia until they did. It was only due to Lenin's force of personality that he managed to harangue his colleagues into supporting an armed coup d'etat on 10 October 1917. In Germany, as this book review says, Schleicher and Hindenburg both thought they could control Hitler, but it turned out that Hitler controlled them instead.
The German electorate certainly thought that without the Nazis, a communist revolution would be imminent. Were they wrong? Maybe, but I don't know better than them. The Germans also thought fascists were preferable to communists. Were they wrong? If the fascists had been like Franco and the communists like Stalin, certainly not, but of course they got a far worse fascist than Franco.
It's not just possible, it's quite likely. With a major communist power in central Europe, there's no saying what the USSR would have done. The soviets wanted all of Europe to be red, and mostly didn't go to war to accomplish this because they couldn't. And there's no reason that communist germany would have felt any different.
I don't think it's likely that X would have been worse for Germany than Hitler, but X could easily have had bad results (imagine a WW2 in which a communist Germany allies with the USSR against the west. Especially if as a consequence of not embracing antisemitism as much they keep all the Jewish scientists and get nukes first. Probably no holocaust but still quite bad!)
Yes. Stalin and Mao were each at least as terrible for their respective countries as Hitler was. If communists took over one of the most advanced economies in the world instead of backward places like Russia and China, who knows what damage they could have done?
It clearly should be asked. Especially in the context of "X would have been worse for the world?" A strong commie Germany-Russia union would have fairly easily occupied Europe.
When Hitler took over, the Army stayed neutral. The Army would have blocked the Communists if nobody else did. It would have been like the Spanish Civil War, except the German Left wouldn't have had enough of a militia to last even a year.
Given that the rise of Hitler led to Germany being bombed into ruins, occupied, and divided among the victors, things were going to have to go very badly indeed under the Communists to be worse. But I think it is entirely plausible that in most worlds where fascists of some kind didn't take power, communists of some kind would have, and that this would have been very bad.
For that matter, how do we know that Hitler's rise to power didn't prevent a smarter, saner, more competent fascist from taking over Germany and the rest of Europe? Maybe we'd be living in a predominantly fascist world if not for Hitler's fanaticism and incompetence.
Hell, how do we know that hostile extraterrestrial aliens wouldn't have invaded Earth in 1946 if WWII hadn't led to the development of the atomic bomb in 1945?
Simply put, we don't. One could come up with any number of "X would have been worse for Germany than Hitler" scenarios that are all, to varying degrees, within the realm of possibility. But those sorts of hypotheticals don't really prove much beyond "reality is complex and chaotic and completely unpredictable." Drawing any other sort of conclusion from them (e.g. "maybe Hitler wasn't so bad after all") would be a terrible mistake in judgment.
And one could just as easily go in the opposite direction too. For instance, how do we know that communism wouldn't have completely faded away by 1950 if Hitler hadn't forced the democratic nations into an alliance of necessity with the Soviet Union? Without WWII, it's a lot harder to see a path that leads to a nuclear USSR and a five decade Cold War.
Besides Hitler, who has led a coup/rebellion that failed to take over a country, then took power through an election (or post-election coalition)?
-Charles Taylor in Liberia*
-Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
-Prachanda in Nepal
Anyone else?
* "He took 75% of the vote from a war-weary electorate desperate for an end to the violence. One of Mr Taylor's campaign slogans ran: 'He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.'" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/04/westafrica.qanda)
Very solid. Clear, straightforward prose that summarized the book, and then extracted and analyzed the part that interested the reviewer, in the process successfully navigating an enormous minefield. I felt like it provided a rough picture of certain aspects of Hitler's personality, and I don't know how accurate that is, but it helped me make sense of it all.
I do think the reviewer should have looked into the last 64 years of scholarship, though, just to give their readers a bit of a head start.
The content:
If shadow cabinets are so bad, why does the UK have them? Isn't having one just a sign of a centrally-organized political party (unlike the main 2 in the USA)?
Like others here, I think the overtly-anti-democratic thing has had its day, and now people are on the lookout for that. I think whoever comes next will have adapted. Either the cult of personality will be so strong as to overwhelm attachment to democracy, or there'll be an ideology that contains anti-democratic elements. Not that that's much different from Hitler, either way. So I suppose this is more a criticism of that segment of the reviewer's analysis - there's no clear lines, no simple categories, and it's all a matter of degrees. Any ideology which looks at half the country and says "it's OK if they vote but it's ethically wrong if they win" is a problem.
Regarding the use of terror, I don't see why the reviewer refers to BLM rather than to Antifa. BLM, IMO, is just a group who're trying to claim they can steer the elephant of popular anger, and are largely ineffectual except at providing cover for other more organized groups to pursue their own agendas. Antifa is organized (somehow) and may actually have goals. As for Jan 6, I'm tired of discussing it with people who haven't watched 6 hours of the Parler footage on ProPublica's site, so I shall not mention it again.
I don't think it's had its day. It just surfaces in different ways now, usually demands for loyalty to institutions and "experts" (academics, who are ideologically homogenous). We saw this happen most clearly during COVID, which amounted to a popular totalitarian dictatorship by scientists (not really scientists) who claimed to provide far superior leadership to democratically elected politicians, the latter of whom stepped aside due to overwhelming public pressure to do so, in a Palpatine-esque "so this is how democracy dies" manner.
And so that's the real risk here. It's not a Hitler-like guy/gal who happens to make spectacular speeches and openly wants to become a dictator. There seems to be a distinct lack of those and no obvious candidates on the horizon. Some people think Trump is a match for this because he happens to get big turnouts for his speeches, but he clearly lacks any sort of dictator or takeover ideology. The threat is more from people who share Hitler's desire to "breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable". Most of the politics of that last ten years can be seen through the lens of the modern day left trying to achieve this dream of a society run by only the "elites" (ugh, hate that term), disembowelling democratic and market mechanisms along the way. The primary difference is that Hitler believed the elite would just be advisors to the one man who made the ultimate decisions, whereas modern leftism is more comfortable with siloed committees of specialists making decisions instead. My guess is that Hitler had little interest in that form of government because the issues he was interested in were simple and general enough that the idea of needing a committee of academics to figure out what to do would have sounded absurd.
Yes, the covid response was one of the things I had in mind. To clarify a bit, I think that the days of directly painting democracy as bad are about over (although hearing people talk about Brexit, maybe I'm wrong). Instead, the new tactic is that democracy is good, but some things are better and more important and take precedence, or alternatively that sometimes choices the people make are simply wrong and should not be allowed (which is in a sense the same thing, elevating their particular ethical standard above democracy).
It goes even further, as we see from the reaction to democracy in El Salvador, Brazil, Israel, and Hungary. People who hate democracy say democracy is good, but what democracy means is that technocrats needs to make the big political decisions, not elected officials, because those decisions are too important. And technocrats also need to make the little decisions, because they aren't important enough. Elections *must* be held, but their outcomes must not affect the smooth running of government.
Yeah, I have yet to hear a principled distinction between "democracy" and "populism" that doesn't rely on an external judgement that places some values higher than democracy.
And to be fair, I don't think democracy is the highest value, either. 50.1% of the voting population doesn't magically make the world perfect. But I do reserve the right to be extremely skeptical of people who put other things above democracy, especially when they claim that they aren't.
This reminds of that scene from "Yes [Prime] Minister" where he and the activist agree that the people can't be trusted to make decisions, even though they completely disagree on the direction of the correction. :-)
Judges are not "technocrats". For Israel the issue is that 1. Separation of powers is pretty important, mostly bc 2. If democratic legitimacy at time t grants unfettered power, there is no guarantee that the incumbents will not encroach at t+1, thus destroying democracy.
Which is exactly what happened in Hungary btw: Orban used his genuine majority to change the rules in such a way that talking about democracy *now* is a sad joke at best.
If you combine the overt pressure of the Twitter mob crowd with the regime directed suppression of competing messages via security state organizations and sympathetic people in key social media organizations, then you have the modern "Spiritual Terror" formula.
Interesting how one guy with rocket and car companies blew much of that up, isn't it?
"When he tested again in 1908, his drawings were so bad he was excluded from consideration. Crushed, Hitler went to the rector of the academy for an explanation. He was told that his test drawings showed he lacked aptitude for painting, but he was encouraged to apply to the Academy’s School of Architecture."
As an artist, Hitler could draw buildings well, but not people.
There's got to be a time travel story here. Nonviolent time traveller employs Hitler as a painter, has confederates buy his work to bid up the price, etc. He ends up too busy with his painting career for his remarkable oratory talents and nasty ideas to gain much power.
Germany ends up with some military dictatorship after the Weimar Republic collapses, Germany rearms but nobody implements any crazy plans to murder a bunch of good German citizens for being the wrong religion or ethnicity. Germany and the USSR eventually end up in a war that doesn't light the whole continent on fire, and Germany ends up getting some support from the British and French.
I've seen variants of this twice in alternative history novels:
In Turtledove's Great War series, one of the American viewpoint characters interacts with a German sergeant with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, who seems tough and competent, but weirdly obsessed with his hatred of Jews.
In L Neil Smith's and Scott Bieser's [i]Roswell, Texas[/i] graphic novel, Hitler shows up as an immigrant to the Texas Republic, who ends up as a prominent artist given to making embarrassing and offensive political rants from time to time. (But there are still Nazis, albeit mostly in England.)
I have read this book and its an excellent eye witness account of history. For me an even deeper understanding comes from The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh https://amzn.to/3YkwibV His early sections on the Nazi's rise and the way they established an authoritarian state are the best parts in my view.
Summarizing: if you think the problem with society is simply that the best people aren't in charge, you're at risk of becoming the next revolutionary. It seems Hitler's whole ideology, along with those of the communists, is all about a near-demented level of belief in some people just being way better than other people in all dimensions (intellectually, spiritually, morally...), and those people thus deserve to be in charge with democracy being a convoluted distraction.
Also: don't go on holiday in the middle of critical political moments.
This is not remotely a fair summary of communist beliefs. It's not even a fair summary of Marxist-Leninist beliefs.
Communists support democracy, hence all the socialist states with "democratic" in the name. What they question is whether the system found in liberal states - one characterized by significant wealth disparities and fixed-term politicians, nearly all of them from or funded by (and, communists argue, governing for) the wealthiest social strata, actually provides it.
Oh jeez. Can everyone please take it for granted that when we talk about the beliefs of Communists we're talking about beliefs inferred from their actual behaviour, not what they claim to believe?
They postulated democracy in the future (in theory) but for now (and in practice) they supported dictatorship of the proletariat and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism “the most class-conscious and politically "advanced" sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form organizations to advance the objectives of communism”
Well shucks, obviously if they put the word "democratic" in the name of their country they obviously love and practice democracy! How could I have been so blind!
Communists have little in common with the variously titularly socialist parties that have some influence in European democracies. And there are no actual socialist states I can think of in the world today. There are some that have stronger controls on capitalism and harness markets as a force for the general welfare, but having a more progressive tax structure, strong unions, and universal healthcare is a long way from "the workers control the means of production."
Does Venezuela even pretend to be a socialist country? Haven't followed developments there as closely as I maybe should. All I really know is that instead of the workers controlling the means of production, they seem to be fleeing to neighboring countries as fast as possible. State control doesn't mean socialism AFAIK.
who? The Cubans, maybe? IDK. None of the marxists I'm familiar with. Also, Marxist != socialism. All Marxists are socialists, not all socialists are Marxists (probably not a majority, but IDK).
>This is not remotely a fair summary of communist beliefs. It's not even a fair summary of Marxist-Leninist beliefs.
This is LITERALLY what the CPUSA was in the early 20th century
Perhaps they didn't think that differences in ability were inherent, but they absolutely considered themselves the elites were wise and compassionate enough to remake society.
> After one of his rants had come to the attention of some officers in the army, he was “posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.”
I'm confused - they wanted to combat democracy, but viewed their role as serving a democratic republic?
It's almost as if the German General Staff in 1919 wasn't wholly supportive of the new Social Democratic government that they'd handed things over to in November 1918.
Think about it - Australia is a democracy, but it's part of the Commonwealth under the King (now). Some people want to make Australia a Republic and dump the monarchy.
Who is more 'democratic' there? If a republic is more democratic than a constitutional monarchy, and you are opposed to the idea of a republic, aren't you opposed to democracy?
Nobody *today* is likely to come out and say "I am opposed to democracy" in a Western-style political establishment, but there are degrees of democracy you may support or oppose.
For me, the interesting issue is The Great Man Theory of History--- In 1840 Thomas Carlyle said, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” But this view went out of style around the time of Darwin and Marx, replaced with a model of interconnected social relationships as the cause of social change.
But from the evolutionary sociology perspective, I wonder if peoples’ strong attraction to charismatic leaders comes from the times when it was adaptive behavior in intertribal conflict. It’s as if evolutionary mechanisms include ‘path dependency’ in the evolution of complex systems.
It’s hard to believe that today’s world wouldn’t be very different absent Muhammad.
>To achieve all this, Hitler concocted a piece of legislation known as the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich.
I guess the phenomenon of crafting obviously BS nice-sounding names for monstrous laws is older than I thought. He should have just called it the Patriot Act and been done with it.
I appreciated the detailed exposition of the lead up to Hitler achieving his goal, which is the part of the book the reviewer chose to focus on. I have to admit that I have a rather selfish reason for that though; I have always meant to read that book and now I don’t feel nearly as compelled to. I enjoyed it.
As to the deeper issue, I thought it really brought into relief the “Swiss cheese problem” nature of these things. It gave me something to think about.
What I have read here is more or less "old and known" - thanks to public eduction in Germany.
The ideas that "Hitler was an incredibly talented speaker" and "the first German democracy was doomed anyway" have been used as a defense by former Nazis. They should be taken with a grain of salt.
What I find worth adding to the picture:
- Despite all instabilities, the Republic of Weimar also had 5 good years. The economy recovered, there was progress in art and science, Germany's post-WWI isolation ended in slow steps. Apart from the question "How could Hitler come to power?", I find it worthwhile asking "Why did the first German democracy fail?" and "Why did the second German democracy NOT fail, given that there were former Nazis and even SS member in key positions in justice and administration?"
- Ludendorff and Hindenburg were supreme army commanders (OHL) during WWI. They are responsible for a lot of the slaughter and the continuation of the war when it was clearly not going anywhere. Their stubbornness triggered uprisings in the army. Later on, to blame their failure on others, Hindenburg used a conspiracy theory ("Dolchstoßlegende") saying that the German army had been undefeated in open battle but backstabbed by socialists/Jews/you name it.
- Large parts of the elites were directly against democracy. Democracy was seen as "bowing to the enemy", "weakening Germany" or "being unpatriotic".
- As the loser of WWI, Germany depended on its former enemies which could either support or weaken political stability. France weakened it by occupying the Ruhr region in 1923. Foreign debt being called in weakened it again after 1929.
- While "the old system" had plenty of love, there was not a lot for democracy, and even its proponents had little experience in it and did big mistakes (bypassing parliament, letting people alone in times of hardship). That the constitution permitted letting a government fail without installing a new one (constructive vote of mistrust), did not help.
Two elements that look like antidemocratic / typical Nazi stuff but were done by others as well:
- Political murders happened in post-WWI Germany without the involvement of the Nazis, but often involving former army units. Even the new democratic government was involved in the murder of prominent communist figures Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919.
- Even the democratic powers had their own uniformed troops (Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold).
P.S.: Two elements that are obviously wrong but were a common pattern:
- Democracies turning into dictatorships or at least right-wing authoritarian regimes was the trend in 1930's Europe (somewhere earlier, see Italy).
- Antisemitism was a tradition in Germany and other parts of Europe.
So the question here is not "How do you spot the next Hitler?" but "How do you turn around a general phenomenon (not a singularity)?"
Do you think it was guaranteed that the Weimar republic would fail? It seems like there were a ton of places where Hitler might have been prevented from rising to power, but without Hitler, could the republic have muddled through and eventually reached some level of stability?
Absolutely not - I find the view that "this system was doomed to fail" cheap and easy. It was used by people to defend their support or obedience. It is also a welcome argument for authoritarians themselves ("this shaky democracy cannot survive anyway; therefore, it is best if we overthrow it"). I would rather remind people what progress Germany had made in a couple of years after having been a backward looking country for decades. On a small, cultural scale, look at furniture design from the 20s - some of the chairs could be from the 80s. How was it possible that this progress was made in such a short amount of time? On a larger political scale: How was it possible that democracy seemed to work between 1924-1929? / The question why the Weimar Republic failed has been discussed extensively. I like the view that while no single reason alone could sink the ship, the combination of all of them was too much. / An extremist with rethoric talent will not find an easy audience during good times (or at least ok ones). The last democrats in charge themselves did not believe in democracy (overruling the parliament and dissolving it when needed) - what message does this send? Plus, millions without food, hope and a place in society - that is always a powder keg for a system. This would be my main lesson from that time: If you abandon large parts of the population, it will eventually backfire. / Check history before Brüning: How did Hermann Müller's chancellorship end? The parties could not agree on jobless insurance. Yes, this is how parliamentary democracy ended in Germany. It was that trivial. / So, overall, I would look at the power of democracies that did not fail and would rather ask: How many "Hitlers in the making" have democracies prevented?
Addendum: Nothing in human society is ever "doomed to fail/succeed/certainly going to happen". Shirer himself did not see the end of the Weimar Republic coming when he was a journalist in Germany before the Nazi takeover.
Things that for historians look like they "inevitably" would happen is in reality just one of innumerable things that could have happened, with varying degrees of probability. Sometimes something everyone regards as extremely improbable (Shirer's assessment of Hitler's chanches of ever gaining power in his writings before 1934) is what ends up happening. Related to this, the impact of coincidences for what happens in an life and in a society, is vastly underrated.
This vast openness to what may happen tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, is the stuff life is made of. That's what makes life alive.
The study of history, by contrast, in the study of life after all life has been taken out of it.
The reason Hitler was transparent about his illiberalism was that he was in the Weimar Republic, where democracy had few friends and the main alternative was Communism. In the US and other Western democracies, democracy is a religion, so being openly anti democratic would be a big mistake. Aspiring dictators in the West claim, instead, to be realising democracy more fully (see Trump, Hungary, Turkey, Israel under its current government, etc.) Specifically, their claim is that limits on their power make a mockery of democracy, giving control instead to a Deep State of shadowy elites. Incidentally, you can see that Hitler gave lip service to the sacred cows of his time. The public in the Weimar Republic was mostly socialist or even communist. So the Nazi party is not simply the German National Party, but the German National Socialist Worker's Party.
"His transparency on this point makes practical sense. The purpose of creating a mass movement, like Hitler did, is to get a segment of the population that’s actually on your side. If you build your coalition pretending to love liberalism and then unveil the plot twist that you’re totally against it, you’re going to damage your base of support."
A decent point, but there's an endrun around this, in that you can gradually redefine what the value you're trumpeting means, and count on group cohesion to make your followers justify it to themselves later. You can loudly trumpet how much you cherish "democracy" in some reverential quasi-religious way, treat voting like a sacred civic ritual, and then gradually redefine democracy to include your vision of a massive authoritarian bureaucracy that makes all decisions about every facet of a citizen's life and say it's still "democracy" because there's voting. All the maneuvering in American politics around the concepts of equity and equality are basically ways to get somebody to commit to a vague ideal with positive connotations, then redefine the ideal to mean something they wouldn't have signed onto originally, and hope the people who openly supported it feel compelled to ride along with the change or even feel compelled to defend each evolution of it.
If a country makes the same stupid mistake twice under two entirely different political regimes, we have to conclude that the problem with that country is that its people harbour an absurd belief regarding what might make them richer and more secure. Germany and Japan had won wars in the late Nineteenth Century which enabled them to go on the gold standard. But both were vulnerable to a 'capital strike' by the Britain and France and, a little later, the USA which were sitting on a mountain of cash. One cause of the First World War was the German belief that the French were trying to wreck their Stock Market as a response to Agadir. Another problem was that German economists (but also JM Keynes) believed that diminishing returns to global agriculture were setting in and that Germany was vulnerable to starvation unless it acquired land to its East. Thus the German people backed the Army's maximal program.
Why did Germany turn into a Dictatorship rather than have a military regime? A big part of the answer is the psychological impact of the collapse of Empires and the failure of Constitutional Monarchies (e.g. Spain). A Dictator-for-Life who could dismiss fractious Parliaments (more particularly if they were elected under Proportional Representation) was a good replacement for the Crowned Head.
What about totalitarian cadre based political parties? Why did they suddenly sprout up? One answer is mimetics. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had succeeded in defeating the Allies and the White Armies. Mussolini, in Italy, was seen as a slightly saner D'Annunzio and once he'd struck a deal with the Papacy, there was an obvious 'demonstration effect' for South Germany. Hitler, a Catholic by birth, wasn't anti-Catholic like the nutter Ludendorff. It must also be said that other right-wing German politicians were deeply flawed. General Schliecher didn't get on with Gen. Blomberg. The Strassers proved inept. Bruning seems to have been a fantasist. The SDs were a house divided and suffered most from the attacks of the Communists. Come to think of it, the Communist strategy succeeded in that they did get to be the boss of East Germany till Gorbachev tanked the Soviet Union.
Hitler seems to have had unusual powers as an orator and he certainly was ruthless in killing his own people. That's a good thing. The only thing worse than a murderous gangster is a murderous gangster who doesn't slaughter any of his own people who step out of line.
Whatever his political- or criminal- skill, the fact Hitler was brought into politics by the Army. First Ludendorff and then Schleicher and Blomberg helped his rise. Hitler carried out the General Staff's maximal program better than they could themselves have done. But it was a stupid program doomed to fail.
"He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions"
Common misunderstanding. The party was very socialist in the meaning of the word at that time: it wanted to organize society like one big company towards a common set of purposes (in this case national glory). Hayek's Road to Serfdom is a book aimed at criticizing socialism, and it mainly focuses on Hitler. Hayek later expressed frustration that the word changed meaning after he published it. Funny how much confusion this creates today when people see it in the Nazi title.
Nope, the chance to avoid 'boy cried hitler' has long passed. It is 100% rational to completely ignore any and all claims that so and so remotely right-wing political figure is a new Hitler because virtually 100% of the times that this has been said in the past have been acts of bold faced propaganda or hysterical nonsense.
Yawn.
Beg to differ; I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the material and found it very interesting.
I'm not sure it gets my vote for most effervescent prose, but it was still perfectly enjoyable.
This comment doesn't seem to count as any of true, kind, or necessary... I would wish to see at least a little effort put into this.
It's plausible to me that JDK did in fact yawn, which would make it true, but I agree it fails the other two tests.
That wouldn’t make it true because “yawn” is not an assertion of the proposition “I yawned”, but a non-cognitive expression of boredom/contemptuous disinterest.
This kind of comment is unfortunately par for the course for this commenter.
(not kind, but true and arguably necessary)
Would have loved if the reflections and take-aways of part 4&5 were weaved into the stricktly 'book summary' part.
As hinted in the introduction, is there a good read on where and why Shirer's analysis clashes with the more contemporary consus among historians?
I think I actually preferred it the way it was. As it was, when I got bored of the detailed retelling of the minutia of Hitler's rise to power in Part 3, I just skipped straight to Part 4, which was actually interesting. If they'd been mixed together, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
If I had a revision to recommend, I'd recommend a note at the beginning of Part 3 saying "This includes a lot of historical detail that not all readers will care about; feel free to skip straight to my analysis in Part 4." Or, you know, make Part 3 way shorter--but I assume some readers will appreciate the detail.
I definitely appreciated the detail. The devil is often in them, and I'd only had the barest grasp on the history. I knew maybe 20%, if I'm being generous, of what the overview gave.
I also appreciated the detail. It's good, if someone is willing to go into some detail.
I don't know enough about the historical subject matter to have an opinion about the content, but in reading this, I'm starting to wonder if people on the internet have been taking the 'literally Hitler' bit more seriously than I realized.
Speaking anecdotally, I've known a few of people who have invoked that phrase (or something semantically identical) in regard to pretty mainstream, moderate, conservative political parties, one of whom was actually German. All were pretty left-leaning, so it's possible there's some motivated reasoning there. By all appearances they were serious, and reinforced their position on pushback, including what I perceived as a significant degree of aggression.
So it's definitely A Thing That Happens. I'm not speaking to how often, but prevalence is non-zero.
Great synopsis. More if a synopsis than a review I think - although the lessons at the end were well thought out.
The only thing I found odd was this
“In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich in Germany, probably to avoid having to serve in the Austrian army alongside his Jewish and Slavic fellow-citizens.”
I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913.
Austria required peacetime national service which Hitler had been ducking, and going to Munich allowed him to dodge it entirely. Not really clear if he was opposed to serving alongside his fellow Jewish and Slavic citizens or was just not keen on suffering the discipline and boredom of being in a peace time army, Hitler being a fairly lazy man by all accounts.
Right. That makes sense then.
Interestingly, Mussolini was convicted of avoiding military service as a young socialist, then later broke from other socialists by advocating Italy join the first world war.
It seems the way he built up the DAP was anything but lazy.
Good point, it is more of a synopsis than a review. I read Shirer some years ago and agree that this writeup is a very good synopsis.
I just finished a good new history of the 1848/49 revolutions ("Revolutionary Spring" by Christopher Clark), and the point about a revolutionary movement needing to be pre-organized and ready to take charge of the apparatus of government comes through strongly. Several of those revolutions were initially successful but turned out to have no plan for actually running things, which helped them quickly flounder in power and they were then swept away by successful counter-revolutions.
Those 1848/9 events were prominent in the collective memory across Europe until World War I, and three of the key locations had been Vienna, Berlin, and Baden (SW Germany). So I wonder now if practical lessons from 1848 were an influence on the tactical thinking of a guy who was born in Austria in 1889.
That also sounds somewhat like the Leninst idea of a "revolutionary vanguard", in that they're both trying to solve the problem of the dog catching the car.
The modus operandi of a revolution is 1. You have something that I want. 2. I will take it forcibly from you. 3. I will feast for a week on the spoils I have taken from you. 4. Thereafter all bets are off, except that life will be very interesting.
That's one version of a revolution. A big takeaway from the history of 1848 is that in real life, with all its complexities of human motivations, there are several different versions. Very different.
> I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913.
In 1909 Admiral Lord Fisher predicted pretty much the exact month WW 1 would start in 1914, based on the time the Germans would complete their frantic digging to widen the Kiel Canal, and allow their High Seas Fleet access to the North Sea and beyond. Apparently a German diplomat told him he was the most hated man in Germany, by the Kaiser down! :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fisher,_1st_Baron_Fisher
The UK was lucky to have someone as competent and far sighted as Fisher running the navy, and modernising it in the face of determined opposition from complacent politians and even most of his fellow officers. I think there's little doubt that without him we would have lost WW1 and the Kaiser's troops would have been goose stepping down Whitehall!
ob-trivia: (From the WIkipedia article) Fisher is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest known use of the phrase "OMG" as an abbreviation for "Oh my God", in a letter to Winston Churchill on 9 September 1917!
edit: On reflection, it's puzzling that the Germans originally built a fleet of warships at a location where they couldn't reach the open sea. It was as if the US had built several ocean-going aircraft carriers in Nebraska! :-)
Germany's geography is more difficult for naval domination than France, Britain, or America's.
The Germans still had the Baltic to dominate, and they could have gone through the Skagerrak.
Did they have a draft or compulsory service? I suppose I should try looking that up. Yes, here we go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Hungarian_Armed_Forces#1867%E2%80%931914
"The creation of Austria-Hungary under the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 separated the Empire into independent Austrian and Hungarian governments. Only the army, foreign affairs, and related budgetary matters remained with the emperor, who held supreme command of all forces in time of war. A new army law decreed universal three-year conscription followed by a ten-year reserve obligation. In practice, only about one in five of those liable to service were called up, and many were sent on leave after two years. "
"I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913."
They may not have put a precise date on it, but 'when is the next big continental war going to break out?' was a staple of the politics of the time:
"Although sometimes dismissed as fanciful and lacking touch with the realities confronting the forces at his disposal, as a chief of General Staff Conrad had ensured the army had remained vigilant and planning for war was at an advanced stage by 1914, although it has been argued that reorganisation and redeployment should have been sweeping in the aftermath of the Redl affair."
The Sherlock Holmes stories are full of "we need to find this missing treaty or else, because affairs are at such a pitch war is likely if this is made public" plotting for stories published in 1904 or thereabouts, and the novel "The Riddle of the Sands" was written in 1903 about German plans to invade England by sea:
"But Emperor Wilhelm II's policy of building up the German Navy and challenging British sea power effected a change in the actual power relations – reflected in the specific literary genre of invasion novels and the identity assigned to the possible invader of British soil.
As described in its author's own words, Riddle of the Sands was written as "... a story with a purpose", written from "a patriot's natural sense of duty", which predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. The whole genre of "invasion novels" raised the public's awareness of the "potential threat" of Imperial Germany. Although the belief has grown that the book was responsible for the development of the naval base at Rosyth, the novel was published in May 1903, two months after the purchase of the land for the Rosyth naval base was announced in Parliament (5 March 1903) and some time after secret negotiations for the purchase had begun. Although Winston Churchill later credited the book as a major reason why the Admiralty had decided to establish the new naval bases, this seems unlikely. When war was declared he ordered the Director of Naval Intelligence to find Childers, whom he had met when the author was campaigning to represent a naval seat in Parliament, and employ him. At the time Childers was writing Riddle he was also contributing to a factual book published by The Times in which he warned of outdated British army tactics in the event of "conflicts of the future". He developed this theme in two further works he published in 1911: War and the Arme Blanche and German Influence on British Cavalry."
Ambitions by all the major European powers, the Scramble for Africa, and the web of treaties, alliances, secret agreements and "if they do X, I promise we will help you do Y" arrangements as well as everyone building up their army (and navy if they could manage it) with The Latest Modern Technology In Making Things Go Boom meant that there was a constant undercurrent of "not if but when" about war.
> The whole genre of "invasion novels" raised the public's awareness of the "potential threat" of Imperial Germany.
So is that like how "environmental catastrophe" figures into modern American left-wing culture?
The last central European wars, Prussia's defeats of Denmark, Austria and France in 1864-1870, had been quick and efficient, so European military officers had assumed the next war would be too. The Euros paid little attention to how drawn out had been the American civil war of 1861-1865, especially the last year of trench warfare, because they were just American incompetents, so what could brilliant Euros learn from amateur Yanks?
To be honest, the North was pretty incompetent by and large in the American civil war.
Btw, there were also the Boer wars,.and the Japanese wars with China and Russia to learn from.
You are wrong in IV. 2. when you say that someone claiming to support liberalism "can’t condone tactics that go outside of liberal norms." The magic words that let one do so are "Popper's paradox of tolerance." Then one is licensed to engage in "spiritual terror" ("vicious personal attacks" and "weaponization of social pressure" clearly describe "cancel mobs") and "physical terror" ("Punch a Nazi," anyone?).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" is inherently a kind of mandate for world domination.
World optimization, please.
"Coordination"
"Her own formula, so she declared, was the more rational, since it was looser and more flexible and could be expected to assume an optimum organizational configuration in a very short time. ... In any case, the evolutionary process would present an absorbing and instructive exercise."
- "Throy" by Jack Vance
Edit: in case it's not clear, this is referring to, more or less, "heads on spikes".
"Fortification"
I came here to mention this same weakness, although I wasn't planning on suggesting any present-day examples.
The difference is whether the party is in power or not. A weak party has to maintain coherence, or their hypocrisy will hurt them. But a party with power over the press can betray their ideals without consequence.
I am broadly sympathetic to the idea of not using examples that would tribalize the discussion, but "weaponization of social pressure" struck me as so on-the-nose that scrupulously omitting the obvious example felt … disingenuous isn't quite the right word, but it's close.
I'm...not so confident.
The example that's springing to mind is Sulla. There's a man who seized dictatorial power, sincerely tried to reestablish the Roman Senate as the center of power, and ended up just setting the stage for Caesar.
I'm not saying that, ya know, they'll lose, I'm saying that it won't be liberalism anymore. Or, to take an example from English history, you can play the Long Parliament game but don't be surprised when a Cromwell arises.
A more direct example here is the way in which the Papen government dissolved the (democratic and semi-autonomous) local administration of Prussia and replaced it with a directly-appointed commissioner…setting an unfortunate precedent for the Nazis to replace any independent authority in the state with their own people.
I'm not sure if the people who advocating Nazi punching on the Internet ever actually met a Nazi in physical life.
But I do agree that those tendencies are concerning.
What was the name of that notorious white separatist that was famous for a little bit? Spencer? Didn't he get literally punched on live TV by someone who believed in punching Nazis?
Wokefolk get Popper completely backwards. He'd go for Nazi's, yes, and Communists too, but not racists, monarchists, socialists, etc. See https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-yale-law-school-protest-and-karl?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fpopper&utm_medium=reader2
This was brilliant. Thanks for the moral courage to flout Godwin's law. What's most striking is how few anti-Hitlerians dare to emulate his virtues, instead of merely condemning his vices....
# A Morally-Neutral Hitlerian Playbook
1. Be abundantly clear on your true goals
2. Recruit true believers
3. Ensure all actions align with those goals
4. Use your consistency to demonstrate the weakness of your opponents
5. First build a highly-structured alternate state before taking over the old one
6. Wait for the right crises (or create your own in a values-aligned way), then act boldly
7. Build a resource-generating flywheel from partial sympathizers
Probably a good recipe for revolution in general. There are a bunch of ways in which the American Revolution followed this playbook.
Yeah, that was the most surprising thing I’ve learned about politics: that both the American revolution and the civil rights movement were primarily built on morally-superior organizing, not rhetoric or public acts.
Yep both of those examples come to mind. Also Mao in China.
All of those numbered steps except #5 apply to the US women's-suffrage movement too.
And in another example which, like Hitler, did not achieve its ultimate desired outcome, the US Confederacy did the first four steps quite intentionally and competently. [20th-century gum-flapping over what the Civil War was "really about" was all Monday morning quarterbacking driven by modern agendas, the Confederate leaders at the time were clear and blunt on that question amongst themselves and their supporters.]
On step number 5 they were a mixed bag -- quite successful in organizing militarily but less so administratively.
For a while it also looked like the Confederates had found the right moment to "act boldly" (#6): a prediction market during 1862/3 would have been pretty sure on the Confederacy ending up successfully separated.
They didn't achieve #7 though, and it may be that they really couldn't win once the North got its own act together.
The Irish in 1916+ seem a good example. Fidel in the 40s and 50s kinda sorta qualifies, too, though not as clearly.
What do you mean by morally superior?
The uprising in the colonies against the rightful authority of the Crown was anything but morally superior.
(Also see what staying under the alleged 'tyranny' of the Crown did to the loyalists in the north: Canada turned out just fine, even without 'Freedom'.)
I should have found a better word. The American revolutionaries may not have been more “moral” than the Tories, but they built a more “virtuous” system of inclusive governance through, eg, decentralized Committees on Public Safety and a coherent Continental Congress.
I don't know about Canada. Trudeau wasn't particularly kind to the recent COVID protestors from what I have heard.
Well, and that was well after they left the Empire.
(To be more serious, I wasn't making a comment about recent events, but about Canadian history in its entirety.)
I like to imagine an alternate timeline where the right crises never occur and Hitler gets bored after a while and quits the party to go back to making bad art or uses his political connections to nab a seat on the board of some Bavarian regional savings and loan, where he can get paid without having to do any real work.
Emotionally, I agree with you. Rationally, I have a hard time imagining a better outcome for Germany (or for that matter Israel and the US) than Germany militarizing then losing to the US. But maybe we would have gotten “cowpox” Nazism with someone less charismatic than Hitler.
Well, wasn't Stalin already in power by the time the angry Austrian took over Germany?
Well, wasn't Stalin already in power by the time the angry Austrian took over Germany?
Yeah, that’s kind of my point. Without Hitler remilitarizing Germany, might it have been annexed by Stalin? Without Pearl Harbor, would the US have been prepared to fight the Cold War?
Of course, maybe the Leftists are right and an isolationist US would have given Russia the space it needed to evolve organically into a humane socialist republic. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, unless we find a Hari Seldon to perfect computational politics so we can prove out counter-factual scenarios.
With Stalin in control and seemingly fine killing millions of his own people, I'm not so optimistic that the USSR could have ever straightened out, even if the west left it alone.
I don't know; the idea that a timeline where WWII happens is the best we can hope for is a pretty grim perspective. On the other hand, 5-6 years ago I read Albert Speers' memoir Inside the Third Reich, and he talks at length about what "audacious mediocrities" most of the upper tier Nazis were. Of the 60 or so gauleiters who formed the backbone of the party leadership, there weren't 10 college degrees between the lot of them. Ribbentrop was made foreign minister despite having no diplomatic training; his chief qualification for the job was that as a former wine seller, he had travelled abroad to France and Italy, something which most other senior Nazis had never done. Speer himself was made Minister of Armaments, despite having no military training or experience in heavy industry. You could imagine an alternate universe where overall Nazi competence was a touch higher and they manage to not merely put the Soviets on the ropes in the early '40's, but actually knock them out of the war and commit even worse atrocities in Eastern Europe.
For Germany to have actually "knocked out" Russia would require the British and Americans to be a bit more wary of Stalin and give him less aid.
Factory bombings didn't do what they said it would, but when one side has all its factories in areas that can be bombed and the other side doesn't, the way to bet is that the eventual winner will be the side with the unbombable areas.
Right. If they were to win, they would have had to win quickly, like in France. Difficult but not impossible.
Slight spoilers for the book I'm mentioning, but Stephen Fry's novel "Making History" plays with an alternate history where Hitler was never born, which ends up taking things in a direction pretty similar to what you describe.
"So when do you think the radioactivity levels in Moscow will fall enough for us to try taking a look?"
"Not for another thousand years, Hauptmann Cohen. Your relatives in the Uranprojekt are quite good at their job!"
Spelled out like that, it occurs to my the Moldbug has explicitly endorsed most of that playbook. To my knowledge, he's only actually acted on 1 (definitely) and 3 and 4 (arguably), though. He's written a bunch advocating 5 and 6 especially, but he hasn't actually acted on them unless that's what Urbit is supposed to be about.
Ouch. Perhaps not the best week for me to have gone down the Urbit rabbit hole. Ah well, technology makes for strange bedfellows...
#6 is really the tricky part, isn't it? External conditions had to be just right for Hitler to find an opening. The Reichstag Fire could have been anything. The Great Depression had to be the Great Depression, with policymakers all over the world shooting the moon on their responses.
I'm struck by how quickly the Nazis organized to achieve total power after taking power in January 1933. Neither the Russian Bolsheviks nor the Italian Fascists moved so fast when given the chance. It could be that the Nazis benefited from studying the history of the Bolsheviks and Fascists. Or it could be that being Germans, and having been through the Great War, they were just immensely organized.
You realize you just predicted that the Austro-Libertarians would take over the US in any crisis?
Having a collection of annecdotes on this is useful, but I'd really recommend [How Democracies Die](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38213092-how-democracies-die) as a general framework for this general topic.
In terms of 'lessons learned', I think it's important to note that any would-be authoritarian dictators are now working in a post-Hitler world.
Society has done a really good job of becoming inoculated to the stimulus 'this person acts like Hitler'. When Hitler was rising to power, he was free to make all the spittle-flecked hate speeches he wanted, and it all seemed fresh and new and exciting. But if you tried that now, you would remind people of Hitler. Which would dampen your message somewhat.
I'm being kind of flippant, but I don't think you can just look at "the elements that let Hitler take over", and expect them to be replicated today by a would-be dictator. Any wannabe führers in 2023 have to work very hard to not seem like Hitler, so their methods and rhetoric are going to be completely different. Like, the closest equivalent we have to Hitler today is probably Putin, and he used a combination of 'being a faceless bureaucrat' with 'having lots of friends in the KGB' to become an evil overlord.
I just don't think you can generalise. Hitler was Hitler. The next fascist dictator will be something else.
We've already had the next twenty Hitlers, and they were all explicitly anti-fascist.
Most of them were Communists, and Communism is a mild variation on Fascism with some of the economic rhetoric changed and a lot of "fascism bad boo" thrown in (at least, post-WW2 Communism is that).
Putin, who is no longer explicitly Communist, justifies his Ukraine war by being against "Nazism".
And in the West we've mostly avoided dictators, but the groups most likely to be acting like brownshirts in the streets are the people who call themselves "Antifa".
In machine learning this is called overfitting. In medicine it's more like an autoimmune disease. We've literally learned "Nazis bad" but nothing else. We've learned "Nazis bad" but forgotten to learn anything about Nazis.
This strikes home, especially as regards to learning. (Almost) everyone agrees "Nazis bad" but how many actually know what it means?
In Germany, a radical extremist illiberal right-wing party is currently on the rise, with one of its main thinkers being "anti-globalist" and "against the masterminds behind the US Government".
And the thing one could take from this review is that "acting like brownshirts in the streets" is *not* what makes something similar to the Nazis, but their enmity of the system, and their willingness and ability to build parallel structures.
Isn't "acting like brownshirts in the streets" the same as the reviewer's point IV.2?
Yes, I phrased that wrongly - it should have been "acting like brownshirts in the streets" *alone* is not...
It is one ingredient, but Antifa seems to be missing all the other ingredients (at least in Germany, I am not so well informed about the situation in other countries).
The extreme right in Germany has a political party and an ideological movement that is not strictly part of the party, but aligned with it. So in the party, one (mostly) gets the part that is on constitutional grounds, while the anti-establishment sentiments are expressed in demonstrations.
In the US, Antifa seems to be organized somehow, but I don't think anyone not in the organization really knows how. In my city, they seem to be able to put together ~50-100 people dressed all in black, wearing black masks and hoods, armed with blunt weapons (and maybe more), ready to commit violence against their enemies, or more usually intimidate them.
I don't track them, but they seem to mostly show up where their counterparts on the right are, or where they think they might be. I haven't heard of any direct involvement with mainstream politics yet. So that's not as bad as it could be.
Although there was someone putting up those "every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings" posters in my neighborhood.
A huge number of German men fought in the the Great War, and a certain percentage of them, like Hitler, thought it was the best thing ever. In contrast, only a small %age of the American right fought in 21st Afghanistan and Iraq and though it was awesome, while almost none of the American left did.
As we've seen in Portland in this decade, a certain number of leftists like street violence, but they've only succeeded because the leftist politicians have impeded the much larger percentage of rightist cops from doing their job in Portland.
"every time a nazi dies an angel gets its wings"
Wow, what an own-goal that slogan is. "All nazis become angels".
People tend to fight the last war. Worrying about literal Nazis in 2023 is like worrying about the monarchists in Germany (or after this many years, about the Peasants's Revolt) in 1932.
Well, I'd be really happy if you were right, but if anti-democratic, anti-liberal, xenophobic and in part anti-semite factions are the leading voices in the strongest opposition parties, this seems like the prudent thing to worry about.
Antifa are more "hateful" than AfD
Hearing what I have to assume is AFD described this way makes me think.
An alternate question to "When can we really know there's another Hitler on the way" is "How can we use the fear of Hitler most effectively to prevent the loss of our power."
Of course, I've had a thought like this since Scott started this, from the Scott quote used at the top of this review. "Illiberal repression" is what we fear. Therefore, liberal repression is acceptable. And in a comment like this, perhaps liberal repression should be enforced. Recently Scott actually wrote about this, in his post about bad definitions of Democracy and Accountability. It's too bad such insights seem to never stick anywhere when relevant.
I live in Germany, and I am scared of the rise of that party. They are strongly intermeshed with the "Neue Rechte", that bases it's thoughts on illiberal, anti-democratic thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt.
Höcke answers in his book, when asked "But isn't the idea of re-establishing fascism as a "softer" variant to the hard, racist NS ideology floating around in some right-wing circles?"
"I don't think much of that. One can hardly deny its historical impact and its serious attempts to overcome the liberalist crises of the early 20th century. But we Germans don't need a "Casa Pound movement" like the one you allude to in Italy: we have Prussia as a positive role model."
In my opinion, Prussia is *not* a positive role model. In the Prussian system after 1848, the King had veto power over legislation and could dissolve parliament at any time. It was an illiberal system, and I don't want a return to anything similar - despite all liberal crises that exist.
If they gain further popularity, I guess we'll see how the lessons from the Weimar Constitution that went into building the Grundgesetz will hold up, and prevent them from remaking the state into what they envision.
There's a lot here I wish to comment on. But I suppose the distillation is that there is a strong difference between what you want, and what should be suppressed through force of government. Everything following is just commentary.
In the United Kingdom, the King currently has veto power over legislation (by withholding royal assent), and could dissolve parliament at any time (reclaiming the Royal Prerogative to do this after the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 was repealed in 2022). Does the United Kingdom have an illiberal system? Was the repeal of this act a slide towards Illiberal Totalitarianism? Is this state of affairs so horrendous that the United Kingdom needs to fear for its precious liberal democracy?
I view these as all silly worries. Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt are all mainstream in academic circles and have been since they were alive. They're sudden popularity among the ill defined New Right is mainly because things are going very poorly at the moment in ways that we were all promised as a society that they never would or could, and so people have to reach somewhere to find explanations and solutions. Whether these solutions are good or not, well, determining that is supposed to be part of the democratic process.
As to Prussia, well, I'll find it quite the task to make a good case why it was any worse than the monstrosity that exists now. The main issue is that in my opinion, the modern German government is a blight not just on the German people, but on all of Europe and the world. It is a joke in certain parts of the world that the German people just can't help themselves, they find a way to make any system awful given enough time. This is not because I hate "democracy" or "liberalism". This is because the German government has made a series of obviously extremely stupid decisions that have impacted itself, Europe, and the entire world.
I suppose the last comment I wish to make is that you fearing AfD is the point. Not by AfD. But by the current regime. Practically everything terrible happening now is a direct result of bad policy by those in charge. This is a global problem, but Germany is a main driver. Given this, it's very important to distract the people from this extremely obvious situation.
Suppose you're in charge of Germany and a political party comes along against basically all of your policies. The easiest thing to do is to find the craziest most socially unpalatable voices in that party, highlight them, and paint the entire party as that group. After all, when they're highlighted, more extreme supporters will come in. This makes your claims more and more reasonable through their own actions, not yours. We can compare this to successful gaslighting. Accuse them of being crazy long enough, and they might go crazy. Then you can say truly, ahah, they're crazy!
Though I would also say don't read too far into the analogy. AfD to me is just another typical European right party. Basically useless. They won't help anything, not because they're all waiting to enact the pogroms, but because their policy solutions are not very good and I don't think they'd know how to enact them even if they did manage to gain power. This however, does not mean they should be feared, or that the current parties in power are better.
Höcke outright says that he wants a "bloodletting" of those who don't agree with him:
"This is also where my fundamental confidence and serenity lie, beyond all horror scenarios. I am sure that - no matter how bad the circumstances may develop - in the end there will still be enough members of our people with whom we can open a new chapter in our history. Even if, unfortunately, we will lose a few sections of the people who are too weak or unwilling to resist the progressive Africanisation, Orientalisation and Islamisation. But apart from this possible bloodletting, we Germans have shown an extraordinary power of renovation in history after dramatic declines."
However bad the current government is, it doesn't want a bloddletting where all people that disagree with it are "lost".
Wtf?
Ironically enough, back in the early days the AfD was founded on an opposition to the Euro.
Which was an entirely sensible position to have. The Euro was bad for most of Europe (even if it was ok for Germany herself.)
Of course, these days the AfD is about a lot of other things.
"Enmity of the system" is just dissent. There is nothing wrong with dissent.
Congratulations, you just "proved" China is a nazi country.
Uh, yes?
Highly nationalist totalitarian state with a mixed-market economy, genocide program and warmongering irredentism. It's Nazi in all but name.
That maybe overstates things a bit, but one example that immediately springs to mind here is that if you compare the rhetorical styles of Hitler and Fidel Castro, they had quite a lot in common, even if their ideas were quite different.
The original Antifa actually has its roots in the Germany of this era. It was originally a militant Communist group called Antifaschistische Aktion under the Communist party (KPD). Even then “fascists” were just everyone who wasn’t a communist, especially the moderate socialists.
From wikipedia “However, after The Communist International's abrupt ultra-left turn in its Third Period from 1928, the KPD regarded the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as its main adversary and adopted the position that the SPD was the main fascist party in Germany.[13] This was based on the theory of social fascism that had been proclaimed by Joseph Stalin and that was supported by the Comintern during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism.
…
During the Third Period, the KPD viewed the Nazi Party ambiguously. On one hand, the KPD considered the Nazi Party to be one of the fascist parties. On the other hand, the KPD sought to appeal to the Strasserite-wing of the Nazi movement by using nationalist slogans.[6] The KPD sometimes cooperated with the Nazis in attacking the SPD.[25] In 1931, the KPD had united with the Nazis, whom they referred to as "working people's comrades", in an unsuccessful attempt to bring down the SPD state government of Prussia by means of a referendum.”
On the other hand, it was the SPD (Gustav Noske) which used the Freikorps (basically the ancestor of the SA) against the KPD, resulting in the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and many others.
You left out that this was as part of the government in 1919, to put down a Communist revolt and potential revolution.
And that makes it okay?
From the beginning, the Weimar republic succeeded due to a Faustian bargain with the ancien regime. The military, the bureaucracy, the courts, the police largely continued in the mentality of the Kaiserreich. While these forces were very willing to combat communists with brutal efficiency, they were either turning a blind eye to anti-republican activities from the right or outright complicit in them (e.g. Kapp-Putsch, murder of Erzberger).
For the moderate forces, this cooperation turned sour when Hitlers government decided to abolish personal freedoms (and democracy) and most of the state apparatus was totally ok with that.
At any rate it’s an essential bit of information. And it doesn’t make the SPD a ”fascist” party. In general communist revolutions are a bad idea (in my opinion).
Weimar Germany actually had a *centrist militia*, the Reichsbanner, that fought the Communists and Nazis.
Yeah, the Communists used to call the SPD 'social fascists' on the theory that there was *no difference* between them and actual fascists. They found out in 1933 they were really, really wrong.
In Weimar Germany, the Nazis and the Communists really were working in tandem. They each wanted to use violence and resentment to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and Christianity. Each strengthened the other, by scaring the center. They competed for members from the lumpenproletariat. But the German Communists had to obey Moscow, which was not in their own best interests.
"This was based on the theory of social fascism that had been proclaimed by Joseph Stalin and that was supported by the Comintern during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism."
Y'know, this finally explains to me how the online leftie warriors (and I don't mean your bog-standard Democrat voter) can call anything to the right "fascism". All Republicans and those who vote for them are fascists. If you think maybe giving drugs to twelve year olds is something we should consider deeply, you're a fascist. You think it might be less confusing to refer to Gessen as "her" not "they", in a sentence where you're trying to work out which 'they' means Gessen and which 'they' means 'the other group of people involved', you're a fascist.
I thought they were just using it as a boo-word, and very likely they are, but they can sincerely convince themselve "Joe who works in the box factory and votes R is a fascist" because they're following in their spiritual father's footsteps: social fascism is A Thing.
You learn something new every day!
Given how cultured and educated you are Deiseach - and versed in Internet arguments going back as far as I can remember to boot - I'm surprised you haven't heard of "social fascism" tilll now. It seems like the sort of thing you can't dodge if you spend any time online interacting with "online leftie warriors". (And honestly, not even interacting with them, just existing in the same forum as them and having to scroll past what they say to everyone else). Like the stereotypical vegan or Crossfitter, the threat of 'social fascism' is very much a case of "they'll very much tell you about it, even if you didn't ask".
I honestly haven't heard of it until now, I must not be engaging with lefty enough spaces!
It does explain so much, though. If Social Democracy is fascism, then anything to the right of Mao is fascist!
How does social fascism relate to cultural marxism?
> We've already had the next twenty Hitlers, and they were all explicitly anti-fascist.
If you define a "Hitler" as someone who comes to power using the Hitler playbook (e.g. being democratically elected and then building a police state), I am not sure there are twenty instances of it happening.
If you define a "Hitler" as someone who gains power by whatever means and then enacts a police state, Pinochet would qualify, and he was not anti-fascist.
> Communism is a mild variation on Fascism
That is as useful to say as "sharks are a kind of tiger". If your audience has never heard of sharks, and you want to convey the idea that like tigers, sharks can sometimes prey on humans, it might be excusable. Given that the audience here has already a conception of both sharks and tigers, any such statement would just be trolling.
Ideology matters. While the early NSDAP did have an anti-capitalist bent, after the "Roehm-Putsch" it mostly let the industry be (provided they participated in the war effort and were not owned by Jews), which was the outcome the big donors of Hitler had hoped for.
Even if you eventually get a totalitarian dictator who is uninterested in ideology and just wants power as an end in itself, they will still be constrained by the ideology of their party. If archangel Gabriel appeared to Stalin in a dream and convinced him that private ownership of industry was beneficial, even he would not have had the power to completely rewrite the economy.
> And in the West we've mostly avoided dictators, but the groups most likely to be acting like brownshirts in the streets are the people who call themselves "Antifa".
Absolutely. Here in Germany, meeting of every moderate party are routinely broken up by uniformed paramilitaries of the Antifa with the police just standing by, watching. NOT.
Yeah, Hitler was toootally a lefty, just like Hirohito. Race warfare, Blut und Boden, extreme nationalism as well as antisemitism are after all core teachings of Karl Marx. I guess the German industry just financed Hitler because they were masochistic. </sarcasm>
While there were some anti-capitalist ideas in the early NSDAP, they stopped mattering much after the Nazis took power. The murders by the Nazis were fueled by right wing racist and nationalist ideology. No Collectivization like under Stalin.
I will grant you that Pinochet did not have a record-breaking death toll.
Wikipedia has a helpful list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll#Political_leaders_and_regimes
(Of course, the main morale of that list is that China really has a lot of population, and whoever murders in China will get into the top 3. I guess one could define a suckiness-index to measure how terrible any particular dictator is per subject-year (taking into account murders, terror, warfare and also long term effects like destroying the intelligentia or slowing economic development), but I think this is futile because we have forms of government which are better than both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships.)
Good point. See https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/135665809?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fhome People can't think abstractly, so they can't plug in "antidemocratic group trying to take over by clever means" in place of "Nazi".
If Fukuyama is right that history is over, with liberalism having won, then we shouldn't expect a repeat.
Given the events of the quarter-century since he wrote, I don't think it's especially controversial to contend he was wrong. I certainly would - although I also don't expect another Hitler, in part because we still (at least half-)remember the example of the first one.
Scott Sumner, Richard Hanania and to a lesser extent Matt Yglesias will all tell you Fukuyama was right.
Do you have links? That sounds incredibly stupid of them.
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-end-of-history-why-the-fed-will-fail/
"Here are a couple facts about his prediction:
1. It would be difficult to find any other prediction in the humanities or social sciences that has proved more accurate. There are many more democratic countries than in 1989, and policy has become much more market-oriented in most countries.
2. When intellectuals discuss his prediction today, 99% assume it failed to come true. Indeed most utter the phrase “the end of history” with undisguised contempt."
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama
https://www.slowboring.com/p/ukraine-and-the-end-of-history
Yeah, dumb of them. https://xkcd.com/1391/ 1989 was less than two generations ago. Pick forty years out of the history books and you'll likely find that hereditary monarchy is "the end of history", with no credible challengers. Being the strongest social science prediction simply states the weakness of social sciences.
Besides which, the next Hitler doesn't have to be credible in the long term. One article talks about how China has undermined itself 33 years into that prediction That's longer than the Nazy Party existed in its entirety.
One part of it is that Fukuyama's actual thesis is a bit more nuanced than the soundbite description usually makes it sound. As I understand it it's not that liberalism will always win in practice, but that there's no longer any credible ideological alternative to liberalism.
At first I though this was going to be a review of my favorite board game and I was dissappointed.
Anyway looking at your list of the keys to making a powerful "nazi" type party the only group that can even remotely do that in the US is the university elites and I seriously doubt they ever would given that they hold a lot of the soft power in gov already. (They do have the requisite money, ability to bully, they don't have a psuedo second state, though ESG money is closeish????? They are open about illiberalism(affirmative aciton Ect), though the time of crisis we had (COVID) has passed. So I feel like a hitler esk figure is extremely unlikely in the current climate and so I won't worry about it.
I definitely think this review was a bit long winded, part 4 was a really good part, and part 3 had too much info about things that didn't matter for the review.
I have fond memories of that game. I even have a copy lying around, but these days I don't think I have the sheer memory and attention to detail required to play it.
I actually do have a copy of that game, but I doubt I could find anyone willing to play it with me.
I am convinced there are real lessons about WW2 you would pick up from playing a good-enough simulation, but there are few people these days who would care enough to try. (Though a lot of the modern simulators like Europa Universalis probably do the job for you.)
according to people who fight real wars mass market games help a lot https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/wargaming-in-the-classroom-an-odyssey/ with understanding. I don't get the actual why very well, but there are some amazing anecdotes about people doing wild moves that make perfect sense from a historical perspective, or repeating the "mistakes" of history because other decisions were far worse.
Interesting! I thought having a lot of people recreationally wargaming might have an effect, and looks like it does! Thank you!
One of these days someone needs to write a book about the wargaming bubble of the seventies. I'm sure it had knock-on effects other than the creation of Dungeons & Dragons.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/history-video-games-europa-universalis/622892/
I think you can get to this article without a paywall about kids in college playing historical video games in history class...
Paet 3 was the best part of the review for me. The detail is new information for me. Sweeping generalisations are cheap.
Why wouldn't they in the face of populism? They already tried a version of the Reichstag fire with Jan 6.
Well, why not list the oratory prowess? I'd maybe put that on point 1, rather than behind 5. A halfway-competent movement will eventually develop insights 1-5, but once-in-a-generation oratory prowess is what lets you actually generate the repeated attempts you need to learn your lessons.
Oratory prowess is a trainable skill. Hitler had talent, no doubt, but with professional training, a staff of speechwriters and a willingness to use pathos that will get mocked mercilessly, I think his speeches would be one of the easier parts of his formula to emulate.
Strongly disagree. Few people have it in them to be fantastic speakers. Today it isn't oratory -- which is more about speaking to an in-person gathering -- which matters so much as it is the ability to use modern media. Very few people have much talent speaking live on camera while knowing millions are watching. Most modern US presidents have had a preternatural ability to speak before a camera and project their charisma through it. Without that rare skill, one doesn't have much of a chance.
Clearly not or this would be much more common. In fact, as the review said, he would have not only not become leader of the Nazis if he didn’t have that oratory power, but he would have lost the leadership soon after.
Not that his oratory does anything fit me much, but my German isn’t great.
Oratory _competence_ is trainable. But true oratory talent, the kind that can regularly move large crowds of people to an almost religious frenzy, has a large and necessary "cannot-be-taught" component.
Among US politicians of the past quarter century I've personally witnessed two who fit that description and in both cases it was a key element of their electoral success: Obama and Trump.
The two of them could not be more different in too many ways to even list, including in their specific oratorical styles. But whether it moves you personally or not there is no denying that Trump's campaign rallies in 2016 -- consisting almost entirely of just him standing at a microphone for surprising lengths of time -- reached those packed crowds like few other things I've ever seen. And Obama in a completely different way could move thousands of people deeply and genuinely, I witnessed that firsthand too.
In place of "oratory" put "ability to manipulate the media". Trump had and has that. So does Antifa. The Left is extremely good at it by now, at "controlling the narrative" by using reporters as predictable puppets.
Hitler had Goebbels. He had a deep bench, actually, of very talented, totally unscrupulous people.
This was good. I still find that I literally don't understand the words being used in these stories though. In the very early days of the DAP, what actually were these "meetings"? I've never been to a "meeting" in my life, so I just don't have a picture of what it was.
When Hitler went fundraising, how did he do it? Was it drunken old aristocratic lechers sitting in great drawing rooms, happy to have a nice young man listen to and agree with their tedious rants about how it was all the jews' fault, and then just writing him a cheque for a thousand deutschmarks?
And those four hour speeches - does anyone listen to a person speaking for four hours? Don't they need the toilet?
Perhaps these are all inconsequential gaps in my personal knowledge. But I still feel like this review has helped, but not quite answered the questions it set out to.
> And those four hour speeches - does anyone listen to a person speaking for four hours?
Chortle! It's amazing how this guy got away with it for so many years:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12325593/Bully-vicar-insulted-dead-people-funeral-offered-naked-massages-punched-people-left-four-hour-sermons-threw-traffic-cones-police-officers-report-finds.html
i am not going to read the article and have no idea what it is about, but that's an incredible url
As to the four hour speeches—such things were not uncommon in Days Gone By. In nineteenth century America is was certainly common for preachers’ sermons to last that long or even longer, every single week. I imagine in a beer hall you have more freedom to excuse yourself than you do in the pews!
Surely you have not gone through your life not knowing what a meeting is? It’s when people meet 🤷♂️
The four hour speeches sound long but I presume it was a night out. The era before Netflix/television was actually more social.
All the meetings I've been to in my life have been *for* something - "we're meeting with the client to gather requirements for this project" or "this meeting is to draw up a plan for the fundraiser next month." So saying someone made speeches at party meetings gives me the rather odd mental image of someone interrupting a boring logistical discussion to make an impassioned speech about democracy.
I assume what they actually mean is a social event - "meet and have a beer with your local party members." But we don't usually call that a "meeting."
I do wonder about the community here sometimes. Nazi conferences were often staged in a beer hall so drink was taken, but that doesn’t stop it being a meeting. And other meetings were in more formal settings.
Scott sets up meetings and some of them are in bars and some of them have large groups and others have as low as two. And that’s all meetings. (There’s one where only one guy showed up but that’s a guy, not a meeting).
anyway you can drink at meetings.
There is little to wonder about here, Hitler talking at a meeting of the party is like trump or Biden talking at their respective conventions. Or it’s like a CEO speaking at an All Hands. The presence of booze is neither here, nor there.
Yeah, I've been wondering about those meet-ups, in connection with someone known for verbal ability.
Perhaps as a variant of rationalist training, some of us should "adopt" particular Cabinet positions and propose more sane alternatives to the policies of the current administration. Sort of the way UK political parties do it. It would help with training good decision-making and provide accountability.
...
Just kidding!
I mean, you can *call* the ACX meetups "rationalist meetings", it's a perfectly valid usage of the word, I'm just saying it might get you a few confused looks because it's not a common phrasing. And that maybe you shouldn't react to the confusion with "are you unaware of the concept of a meeting?"
I suppose you are a person giving confused looks, but I don't think calling an ACX meeting a "meeting" is an uncommon phrasing. What would a "meetup" be other than a "meeting"? I honestly can't think of a way a "meetup" could be anything else.
You've never been to a big meeting of the such-and-such society? A bunch of people mill around chatting, then one or more people give talks, then there's some questions from the audience, then the meeting ends and people mill around chatting some more? This is what political party meetings look like all across the world, and I imagine that early NSDAP meetings were pretty much the same (with the added bonus that you could drink during the meeting instead of waiting until afterwards).
That's actually helpful. I have been to a few meetings like that. I guess what's confusing me is what they talked about, seeing as I don't understand local politics, much less German local politics in the 1920s. But they must have had a bunch of local issues to discuss, like occupational licensing, regulations on hours and apprenticeships, rules on conscription... OK, yeah, I'm starting to see it now.
Yeah I think that one thing that is lacking in this review and in most discussions of the NSDAP is what their policies on things actually were. One might get the impression from our popular conception of the Nazi Party that their whole policy was "be evil, lol".
Reading the NSDAP's "25 point plan" starts to give some idea of what the party was really all about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program ... it's definitely a combination of the sort of German nationalism that would eventually get them into trouble alongside a bunch of FDR-style economic leftism and some interesting points whose underlying context I don't understand. Interesting to see the Nazis demanding common law, given how few other British things they seemed to be keen on.
This is part of what confuses me. At this point, early 1920, they'd got an official name and official membership, but they didn't have any appointments - no one in parliament, no affiliated mayors or even town councilmen, so far as I can see.
What gives an "organisation" in this state the chutzpah to "demand" things like a sweeping change of the legal system of the entire nation? There's an element of crazy there which is... bracing and interesting, but also fairly easy to spot.
Also, Hitler was assigned to watch this party, took it over and turned revolutionary? So, just like the movie The Day Shall Come, then?
The social element is also to get ordinary people to come along: "Come to the meeting in the local pub, listen to us explain what we're all about, and sign up if you like the cut of our jib. Even if you don't, at least you can have a few beers and be entertained".
Think of the kind of political meeting as described by Chesterton in his autobiography:
"One [member of the Republican Club at Oxford] was John Swinnerton Phillimore, son of the old Admiral whose name made a sort of background for the Kensington of my boyhood, afterwards Latin Professor at Glasgow University and one of the first classical authorities of his time...But John Phillimore, as things fell out, had to be a rather unique sort of don; and at once a popular and a pugnacious professor. You could not conduct classes amid the racial and religious chaos of Glasgow, full of wild Highlanders and wild Irish, and young fanatical Communists and old fanatical Calvinists, without possessing some of the qualities of the quarter-deck. Most of the stories about Phillimore read like tales of mutiny on the high seas. It was shrewdly said of him that the effect of the word "gentlemen," as said by him, was like the famous effect of the word "Quirites!", as said by Caesar. On a similar occasion an insubordinate but intelligent Glasgow crowd seems to have instantly grasped the gratifying irony of his appeal, "Gentlemen, gentlemen! I have not yet ceased casting my pearls."
...Now I thought I knew all about Revolutionists long before I met the representative of the Republican Club. I had talked to them in dirty taverns or untidy studios, or more depressing vegetarian hostels. I knew there were differences in cut and colour; and that some were more really revolutionary than others. I knew that some wore pale green neckties and gave lectures on decorative art; while some wore red neckties and made speeches on Trade Union platforms. I have sung "The Red Flag" in hearty chorus with the latter, and William Morris's "England, Awake" in more refined accents with the former. And though I knew nothing of the comparison with another method, I did more and more realise, with an ever sinking heart, that for some reason we had not got a decent revolutionary song to our name; and that in the matter of producing any respectable sort of Hymn of Hate, my countrymen were a washout.
One weakness of these popular war-songs was that they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn. "England awake; the long long night is over; faint in the east behold the dawn appear." They were all like that; they were all Songs Before Sunrise; as if the sun that rose on the just and the unjust did not also rise on the conquered and the conqueror. But the English revolutionary poet wrote as if he owned the sun and was certain to be the conqueror. In other words, I found that the Socialist idea of war was exactly like the Imperialist idea of war; and I was strengthened and deepened in my detestation of both of them. I have heard many arguments against the idea of a Class War; but the argument which discredits it for me is the fact that the Socialists, like the Imperialists, always assumed that they would win the war. I am no Fascist; but the March on Rome gave them the surprise they needed. To say the least, it considerably halted the inevitable proletarian triumph; just as the Boers had halted the inevitable British triumph. And I do not like inevitable triumphs. Also I do not believe in them. I do not think that any social solution, even a more manly one like that of Morris, should be called "as sure as that tomorrow's sun will rise.""
This kind of political meeting:
"These two voices of Belloc, so to speak, were so distinct that he could sometimes pass from one to the other and make it seem like two persons speaking; effecting a transition on a platform almost as dramatic as the dialogue of a ventriloquist with his doll. When he stood as a Liberal member for Salford, he often managed to bewilder his hecklers by spraying them with these sharply alternated showers of cold and hot water. Salford was a poor and popular constituency, in which there were many strata of simple and provincial people, retaining the prejudices of our great-grandfathers; one of them being the touching belief that anybody with a French name could be made to cower and grovel by any allusion to the Battle of Waterloo. This was probably the only battle of which the heckler himself had ever heard; and his information about it was limited to the partly inaccurate statement that it was won by the English. He therefore used to call out at intervals, "Who won Waterloo?" And Belloc would affect to take this with grave exactitude, as a technical question put to him upon a tactical problem, and would reply with the laborious lucidity of a lecturer, "The issue of Waterloo was ultimately determined, chiefly by Colborne's manoeuvre in the centre, supported by the effects of Van der Smitzen's battery earlier in the engagement. The Prussian failure in synchrony was not sufficiently extensive, etc." And then, while the unfortunate patriot in the audience was still endeavouring to grapple with this unexpected growth of complexity in the problem he had propounded, Belloc would suddenly change his own note to the ringing directness of the demagogue, would openly boast of the blood of that Pyrenean soldier who had followed the revolutionary army of Napoleon, and risen in its ranks, through all the victories that established a code of justice all over a continent and restored citizenship to civilisation. "It is good democratic blood; and I am not ashamed of it."
This transition of tone had a tremendous effect, the whole hall rose at him roaring with applause and the investigator of the Belgian campaign was left isolated."
Or this:
"Nobody ever did it better, when he chose, than old John Burns, for whom I have spoken and voted so often in the days when I lived in Battersea. To mention one case, as a sort of model; it was natural enough that the old Dock-Strike agitator, having become a Cabinet Minister and in many ways a rather Conservative force, should be assailed by more revolutionary groups as an extinct volcano if not a surrendered fortress. But Burns knew how to deal with that sort of thing when speaking to democrats; by cutting deeper into human facts instead of sliding away upon legal fictions. He was taunted by some Socialists at a Battersea meeting with not having opposed the Royal Grant to Queen Mary or some princess at the celebrations on the appearance of an heir. I can imagine how the smoother sort of Lib-Lab social climber, passing through Parliament into the governing class, would explain away his position in terms of the etiquette of the House. John Burns said, "I am the son of my mother and the husband of my wife. And if you ask me to put a public insult upon a woman who has just borne a child, I will not do it." That is English rhetoric: and it is as good as any in the world."
Damn it, now I'm distracted off the main subject, but yeah: I think Chesterton is right here when we talk about UBI and what it might be in effect, rather than theory:
"The thesis of the book is that the Socialist movement does not lead to Socialism. This is partly because of compromise and cowardice; but partly also because men have a dim indestructible respect for property, even in its disgusting disguise of modern monopoly. Therefore, instead of the intentional result, Socialism, we shall have the unintentional resultant: Slavery. The compromise will take the form of saying, "We must feed the poor; we won't rob the rich; so we will tell the rich to feed the poor, handing them over to be the permanent servants of a master-class, to be maintained whether they are working or no, and in return for that complete maintenance giving a complete obedience." All this, or the beginnings of it, can be seen in a hundred modern changes, from such things as Insurance Acts, which divide citizens by law into two classes of masters and servants, to all sorts of proposals for preventing strikes and lock-outs by compulsory arbitration. Any law that sends a man back to his work, when he wants to leave it, is in plain fact a Fugitive Slave Law."
Great review. I think, from your account, Shirer underestimates the seriousness of the threat of Soviet Russia, and the extent to which it explains support of Hitler without having to reach for clichés about Germans being keen on being told what to do. Stalin would have killed millions of Germans if given half a chance, and at least some of the shock about the rise of Hitler stems from a Western-centric worldview - if France had been ruled by a genocidal lunatic, and then Germany had followed suit, there would have been much less of a feeling that this was an extraordinary event that required a vast amount of chin stroking.
Which also makes modern American (or indeed general developed world) concerns about dictatorship seem overblown. If the rise of a dictator requires a realistic threat from an insanely evil external enemy, we'll probably be fine until the robot apocalypse engulfs us all.
(And, as a thought experiment, if the robot apocalypse is surprisingly slow moving, wouldn't a lot of his most committed enemies vote for dictator Musk, even if he was running on a platform of "I am evil and I will destroy [ethnic group], but I am the only person with any chance of defeating the robots"?)
I think part of the point is "Notice here that it doesn’t matter whether there’s “objectively” a crisis—Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. As long as Things Can’t Go On, it’s a good time for Hitlers."
Things in Germany aren't objectively catastrophic right now - and still people flock to the right wing extremist party, because it succeeds at painting a picture where the elites don't care about them and aren't able and willing to solve problems.
I'm not so sure about a "largely fictitious Communist revolution" - Marx had expected it to happen in industrialised Germany, not Russia, after all. And the shock of the Russian Revolution probably was still overhanging everything - who would have believed that a bunch of rabblerousers could get the entire vast Russian empire behind them and end up executing the royal family, with the rest of the monarchs of Europe (their blood relations) doing sweet damn-all about it because, uh, politics?
If it could happen there, why not here? I imagine a fair few people thinking. After all, the end of the war had forced the end of the monarchies as well; from the new 'democratic republic' states to full-blown Communist revolution must not have seemed like that giant a step.
Well, I'm not saying that there was no real danger of that happening - just that Hitler used that danger, and blew it out of proportion.
The same way populists (on the left and the right) use the current crises (pandemic, war, inflation) to erode trust in the democratic systsem.
Why do you say that Hitler used the danger and blew it out of proportion rather than "Hitler sincerely believed in the danger, and took extreme actions to stop it"?
There seems to be a temptation to attribute insincerity to Hitler's actions.
Well, maybe I would have judged differently in 1933 - but knowing the outcome, it seems pretty clear that this wasn't *about* communism, it was about building the state he envisioned already in 1925 (as quoted in the review).
In 1932, Hitler stopped talked about Jews much, and started talking about Communists instead. That's what he had to do to increase his vote share and not look like a nutjob. After 1934, when he was in power solidly, he went back to talking about Jews and proved that he *was* a nutjob. See https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
"There seems to be a temptation to attribute insincerity to Hitler's actions."
Yeah, I _am_ tempted to attribute a variety of vices to Hitler.
Sure, but there's a difference between "There was no chance at all of aliens landing in Bavaria and Hitler only whipped up fake fears" and "A flying saucer had been witnessed landing on the village green and Hitler used public alarm to the benefit of his party".
You have to account for "Why did Germans supporth Hitler?" and if people had reasonable fears that makes it easier. If the average Johann in the street was worried about the Communists because they'd been going around beating people up and smashing windows, that makes him more likely to be sympathetic to "Well I don't agree completely with this guy but he's right about the Communists", whereas it's much more difficult when it's "The Communists are just harmless charity workers".
In Germany in the years leading up to 1933, both the Communists and Nazis were sponsoring street-fighting, which the order-loving German public found intolerable. Occasionally, the Communists and Nazis brawlers would cooperate against more centrist forces of law and order. (Up until 1934's Popular Front, Stalin felt the main foreign enemy that his Anti-Fascists should be attacking were the "social fascist" Social Democratic Party of Germany, who were, to a rough approximation, the Good Guys in Germany.)
In England, with its more well-developed sense of humor, these Nazi-Communist riots would have led to "a plague on both your houses" attitude. (A generation later, the classic reactions of English rockers to late 1960s leftist political street-fighting was disapproving irony: see the Beatles' "Revolution," the Stones' "Street Fighting Man," and the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." And The Kinks were so conservative that they didn't even have a hit in this genre.)
But in more tightly wound Germany, Hitler was able to manage to persuade a large fraction of Germans that the solution to fighting in the streets was to put one set of street-fighters in charge.
Was Shirer part-German-American? He was a bourgeois Midwesterner, born in Chicago, raised in Iowa. For Midwesterners of his generation, the more impressive performance of Brits over Germans had personal ramifications.
This is really profound. It's the Germans' total inability to operate on the basis of irony which is responsible for all of this. It's not that they're servile: it's that they don't know how to wink, and as a result, they will fall head over heels for an ideologue who convinces them that he has logic on his side.
To be fair, "because, uh, politics" includes the end and aftermath of WWI, which may have had a negative effect on said monarchs' willingness to pursue a vigorous foreign policy.
There was a Communist uprising in Germany after the First World War, the Sparticus revolt. And the Communist party was responsible for violence after that, they had their own paramilitary wing. The later leader of East Germany Ulbricht and future leader of Stasi Mielke, of the Communist party, were ordering policemen assassinated in 1931. And as the review mentioned, at times the Communists apparently cooperated with the Nazis because they felt their real enemy were the moderates.
Moreover, the 1918 German Revolution started out largely Marxist in character, until the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) leadership got out in front of it and redirected it towards establishing the liberal Weimar Republic, through a combination of persuasion (pre-1918 the lines between the SPD and German Marxism were a bit blurry, making it easy for SPD leaders in the Reichstag to claim leadership of the revolution), feit accompli, and the backing of the German military leadership (who vastly preferred an SPD-lead liberal republic over a completed Soviet-style Communist revolution).
The Spartacist revolt, as I understand it, came out of a split between the SPD on one hand (which wanted and got a liberal democracy) and committed Marxists on the other hand (who wanted a full Soviet-style revolution), with the latter deciding to resume trying to have a full Communist revolution whether the SPD was on board or not.
Communists had taken power in parts of Germany before. In fact Hitler was in bavaria during the month long Soviet there (not mentioned in this review).
It’s actually not quite clear what he was doing - he was still in the army at the time.
I've read both Rise and Fall and Shirer late book about France, "The Collapse of the Third Republic", and I found underestimating the evils of Soviet Communism to be a major blind spot of his. I read him as being somewhere on the leftward side of the liberal political spectrum, most likely a New Deal Democrat with Social Democratic sympathies.
Like many inhabitants of that part of the political spectrum in the early-to-mid 20th century, Shirer seems to have viewed revolutionary Marxists as being more-or-less on the same side despite differences of degree and preferred tactics. He did recognize some of the flaws and evils of Stalin's regime in particular, but nevertheless downplayed and excused them to a degree, and the evils he did recognize he mostly compartmentalized specifically to Stalinism rather than seeing them as emblematic of more general flaws with revolutionary leftism in general, Marxism in particular, or even with the non-Stalinist elements of the Bolsheviks.
Shirer was pretty similar politically to his fellow journalistic bestselling author Theodore White, author of the "Making of the President" series, who spent much of WWII hanging out as a reporter for "Time" with future Chinese Communist Party foreign minister Chou En-lai (now Zhou). Just as Shirer was fired by William Paley of CBS in 1947, White parted company in the 1940s with Henry Luce of Time.
In his memoirs, White talked about how the Communists invading South Korea in 1950 came as a big shock and embarrassment to him as an anti-anti-Communist. I'm not sure that Shirer ever admitted to that.
A nice review, but I found the frequent mention of “Hilter” instead of “Hitler” distracting!
Agreed! On both halves. I would have thought a spell checker would have caught those...
I enjoyed the Hilters. Maybe they made the writing feel more organic, or maybe I finally experienced the thrill the other side feels when misgendering or deadnaming their enemies.
Ironically, the name Hitler itself was the product of a clerical error.
Elaborate on that last bit, if you would!
I think someone else in the comments scooped me on this, but as the story goes, in the process of altering the birth certificate of Hitler's father Alois (to legitimise Alois as the son of Johann Georg Hiedler), Johann Georg's surname on Alois's certificate was mis-written as Hitler.
I don't think it was ever fully clarified which one of the Hiedler brothers was de facto Alois's biological father. Maria Schicklgruber was, by local accounts, fond of both.
Thanks, very interesting.
Seeing that Schicklgruber last name reminds me also of a really funny part of Shirer’s book: he ponders fate and whether history would have turned out quite the same if that would have turned his last name. After all ‘Heil Schicklbruber’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.
> There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schicklgruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional “Hello.” “Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine.*
Yes, commenter tempo got to that, slightly downthread:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall/comment/21880400
I don't have a native ear for German, but hindsight bias is powerful: perhaps we'd see Schicklgruber as much more menacing than we do now, maybe even wondering how Schicklgruber could have become the master of Germany without the fearsome one-two punch of the stressed syllables, having to make do with the curt and timid 'Hitler'; or perhaps (as Eric Rasmusen suggests) he'd have chosen a different name for himself sometime during his ascent.
It just made me think of the tote bag. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/my-favorite-color-is-glitter-hitler-tote-bag/
And I see the very first "Hitler" in that article is ALSO misspelled "Hilter". Phenomenal.
You can tell nerd culture's drifted when nobody's posted the obvious Monty Python sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlmGknvr_Pg
See Monty Python on this, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkcP0olmQY.
The English pretty much socially constructed what we think of today as "humor."
After a quick count, it's 190 "Hitler"s and 10 "Hilter"s. Only a 5% error rate. Practically insignificant, even!
Does anyone else feel like Scott wrote this one, based off the opening section? I know the fan favorite right now is that he wrote the Njal's Saga one, judging by the Manifold prediction market*... but I can't help but feel that the opening section of this one sounds *so much like Scott*, this one should at least be in the runnings for "the one written by Scott".
*: As of the time of this writing, Manifold estimates an 84% chance he entered the book reviews (https://manifold.markets/warty/did-scott-alexander-enter-his-own-b) and an 80% chance he wrote the Njal's Saga review (https://manifold.markets/ShakedKoplewitz/did-scott-write-the-njals-saga-book) - implying a roughly 95% estimated chance that, if he entered, he entered with Njal's Saga.
I trust Scott when he says he didn't write any of the finalist entries. If we're not going to believe that, then there isn't much point in having a book review contest in the first place, he can just put up his own reviews as and when he likes.
Hmm, but this time he very deliberately *didn't* say he was staying out of the contest:
"Last year people kept guessing that various reviews were by me, and I had to reassure you that no, I hadn’t secretly entered my own contest. This year I refuse to confirm or deny anything, so have fun speculating!"
(from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-274, point #3)
Actually, there's another possibility: that Scott takes what he thinks is a good book review and gives it a good two-hour stylistic edit before showing it to us.
No. Scott can't write something that long without throwing in a dozen or so funny jokes.
True. And also developing a schema for thinking about the book's topic.
The intro was written well enough for an ACX-review (I. and II.), the remainder underwhelming. And kinda lazy: Ok, Scott has read only one book about Putin, it seems, but this is HITLER and just one ooold book and the author claims to be ignorant about more recent historiography. And the content shows: he/she is.
Scott has a lot of admirers, admirers of his style as well as his substance. (And that's a good thing.)
Scott never writes book reviews that can be described as mostly a synopsis. His reviews invariably interweave synopsis with his thoughts about the topic. I think we can be confident that Scott did *not* write this one (unless he was actually trying to be misleading, & trix like that are not his style).
Interesting look at how it happened. It does bring up all the alternate history speculations: did it have to be Hitler? By this, yes it did. So what would have happened if he had been killed during the First World War?
Or if the Axis Powers had won the First World War, would there have been a Hitler? Sure, he might have gone off and got tangled up in politics, but he might have remained a small time demagogue because Germany and Austria would still have had their monarchies and their empires, and the balance of power would have been different in Europe. Things would not have been the same when the Great Depression hit - there would have been no ready-made "I'll overturn the Treaty of Versailles extortion and Make Germany Great Again" platform.
My favorite "what if", is what if Hitler's father hadn't changed his name when he was 40 *and* had it mispelled to 'Hitler'?
From the book...
<quote>
There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler,
but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before
his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his un-
expected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-
old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler
would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or
anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler
could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the
world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the
tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses
acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schickl-
gruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike
chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies,
but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the
Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional
“Hello.” “Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine.*
* Hitler himself seems to have recognized this. In his youth he confided to the only
boyhood friend he had that nothing had ever pleased him as much as his father’s
change of names. He told August Kubizek that the name Schicklgruber “seemed to
him so uncouth, so boorish, apart from being so clumsy and unpractical. He found
‘Hiedler’ . . . too soft; but ‘Hitler’ sounded nice and was easy to remember.”
(August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 40.)
</quote>
> He found ‘Hiedler’ . . . too soft; but ‘Hitler’ sounded nice and was easy to remember.
As I understand it, "Hiedler" and "Hitler" sound exactly the same in German. As you mentioned, "Hitler" was a misspelling. So how can one sound nicer than the other?
Heidler has a hard "d" but it's not as hard as a "t". They don't sound exactly the same.
Also, "ie" and "i" are different sounds in German.
It looks like Adolf would have grown up in an area speaking Central Bavarian, part of High German. I know nothing of these dialects, but Wikipedia suggests that one of the features of "Central" Bavarian is voicing of consonants, meaning "Hitler" might come out "Hidler". And I have no idea what the vowel shifts might be...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bavarian
Hitler - "hit-lah"
Hiedler - "heed-lah"
The d would be pronounced like a t, because of Auslautverhärtung.
Quite right--except he was smart enough to have changed it to something that sounded grander, like "Adolf Stalin".
It‘s been a long while since reading Shirer but this synopsis has left me as unimpressed as reading the whole tome some 30 years ago.
He (and countless others to be fair) are not able to answer the two basic question: Why Hitler? Why Germany?
Without answering them, one cannot try to get a feel for similar situations today.
The Man met The Moment. Or, rather, The Men. Goering and Goebbels were very smart, and maybe even more important than Hitler in The Moment of 1932-1933, though Hitler was the man with the guts to take the necessary risks. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
I wondered how he could have been stopped and identified basically 2 big moments:
1. His 5 year sentence (which was supposed to be life) was reduced to 9 months. Maybe when officials pass laws like "treason gets you life" they do it to signal how tough they are, while still knowing that no one will actually serve life. Alternatively, it could be possible that the people in charge of the courts optimize for shorter sentences and don't mind flouting or stretching the rules. I'm of the unpopular opinion that if someone holds a ton of people up at gunpoint, they should be in prison for decades if not life, but I understand that not a lot of people agree with that, so I don't think that's a viable anti-Hitler path.
2. Forming a coalition to stop him from getting the votes. If you recognized that Hitler is a unique threat, you would have to briefly set aside your differences and secure a majority, then ban the Nazi party and jail him for the various crimes he committed, this time for life, or disappear him if possible. The 3 biggest complications with this plan is if a) the differences are too great to set aside, b) Hitler is not seen as a unique threat worth doing this for, and c) for some reason you are not able to exercise your power to stop him when you do form a coalition.
This episode comes across as an unstoppable force (Hitler) meets a very flimsy object. I view their inability to imprison him or execute him for treason to be downstream of their inability to form a coalition - everyone just had weakly held pro-liberal beliefs and viewed any attempt at upholding the law or building a majority coalition as Just Not Worth It. They simply didn't care about liberal democracy enough and when economic strife hit it was waiting to be overthrown.
The problem with #2 was that the Nazis and the KPD (the Communist Party of Germany) between the two of them held a majority of the seats in the Reichstag (296 out of 584 seats). There was no way to get a majority without one or the other of them, or at least picking off a faction of one of them. It didn't help that the rest of the Reichstag was split between 11 different parties. There were three major ones: the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, and the DNVP (a coalition of monarchist conservatives and non-Nazi militarist nationalists, with the latter firmly in the driver's seat by 1932). Then there were a couple of splinter parties with 10-20 seats each (the BVP, which split off of the Center Party, and the DVP which was a former major party (a somewhat more classical-liberal counterpart to the DNVP) but had lost most of its support in recent years), and a long tail of fringe parties with 1-5 seats.
While the Nazis and the KPD were mortal enemies, the had a couple things in common. Both had strong internal party discipline, both had explicit goals of ending Weimar democracy, and both parties' leaderships had made a strategic decision to oppose any government they didn't lead.
Yea the Republic was sure to end, and in the chaos it happened to end up in Hitler's hands is my preliminary takeaway.
Good points. A major takeaway from Hitler's rise to power is that it is also important how those you are up against, act. If they cannot agree among themselves, show weak leadership, and constantly shoot themselves (and each other) in the foot, your odds of success increase.
Such weaknesses among Hitler's many opponents were a major factor behind his initial successes - both nationally and internationally. Sure, he was a ruthless and intelligent politician with good organizing skills and the gift of the gab, but the context he operated in is perhaps the main factor behind his rise to absolute power, plus that he came quite close to dominate Europe and the world. Worth noticing if one attempts to draw lessons for the future from this and other rise-of-dictator stories.
The court system in the Weimar republic was basically the same as in the monarchy. It is generally described as "blind on the right eye". Crimes which would earn a communist the gallows would earn a right wing actor a year of Festungshaft, even if the courts had to disobey the letters of the law to do so.
Stopping the NSDAP by making it illegal is not easily done. First, state repression was kind of frowned upon. The SPD was banned by Bismarks Sozialistengesetz (1878-1890), and it was likely not a fan of such measures.
When the NSDAP entered the stage, it was by no means an unique threat to the Weimar republic. Plenty of groups from the far left and far right were openly opposed to parliamentary democracy. I think the Weimar strategy was to generally offer all of them political participation because the alternative would be more violent uprisings (like the Kapp-Putsch).
As the NSDAP was gaining a larger share of the vote, banning them would have meant risking open conflict. Given that the army, courts and police were unreliable in their defense of liberal democracy at the best of times, who should enforce such a ban?
I also do not think that the Communists would have voted for a ban of the Nazis, because it would create precedent for banning the KPD, which would be the obvious next step.
I am not sure that banning parties is generally a successful strategy within liberal democracies. The federal republic of Germany banned the KPD and some party which was obviously meant to be a successor of the NSDAP, but I think this was at best a cosmetic operation like banning the swastika. Banning the AFD (which polls at ~20%) is not something anyone seriously considers, nor would I think it appropriate.
The banning part is mostly due to their leader being a maniac and violating the law. I don’t follow current German politics, but the AfD probably doesn’t break the law or represent a fascist threat like the Nazi party did. If the leaders of the AfD were engaged in trying to set up an independent republic inside of Germany, or they used force and fought other parties in the streets then banning them could be justified.
Not bad, not a winner. Two nits to pick: A) Hitler as the "7th-member´" of the DAP - is Hitler's fabrication, (he was 55th, his number "555"; the DAP started the count at "501" to look less tiny). As are some other details. - B) The votes of the catholic "Zentrum" were needed , and there was a lot of pressure+promises - Hitler got the Vatican also to sign the first international agreement with the new regime ( wikipedia: "Reichskonkordat" ) - but their "Yes" was not that enigmatic: The then tiny democratic-liberal party agreed, too. (One of them became 1949 the first president of West-Germany, Theodor Heuss.) Though their votes were not needed. After all, there was SA with guns in the hall. Btw: See 2014 in the Crimean parliament voting for a "referendum". - I do agree with "do not call them Hitler", I disagree with "open about their illiberalism": Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Putin - all stick to their "we are flawless democrats, of course", as does LePen or AfD.
It seems a bit unfair to ding Shirer for "his prejudice against...the supposed gullibility and servility of the German people", given that the actual history involves a huge swath of the population--including much of its elite--openly voting for and supporting a man who, by the reviewer's own admission, was spectacularly open about wanting to become the nation's totalitarian dictator. Say what you like about Hitler's organizational savvy, rhetorical skills and political acumen--the public clearly knew what he was selling, and they were buying in droves. (*Why* they were so enthusiastic about autocracy is perhaps an interesting cultural/historical question to debate, but Shirer was clearly correct in observing that they were so--just as they were unquestionably in deep sympathy with Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism.) Surely, then, "they have the support of (much of) the public, at least at first" belongs *somewhere* on the list of attributes of successful dictators, no?
Why does support for totalitarianism have to imply gullibility? I mean, obviously nowadays it would, but back then, democracy seemed quite weak and impotent
This comment section in general has shown a disturbing lack of awareness that we're looking back on this with almost a century of hindsight.
When your democracy is as weak as Weimar Germany's was, and communism is on the march, I can empathize with people who are desperate for an alternative. We can look back now and say that the cure was worse than the disease, but that wasn't necessarily obvious in the moment.
Shirer didn't have almost a century of hindsight--he was simply an American raised in a relatively freedom-respecting democracy who found it shocking and appalling that an entire nation embraced a fanatical tyrant and begged him to rule over them autocratically while sending them off to a ruinous war of conquest. Now, one could fault him for coddled naivete--he was evidently unaware that eager embrace of tyrannical fanaticism was a sentiment hardly confined to prewar Germany--but I don't see how one can fault his basic diagnosis: that in the end, Germans got the monstrous dictator they wanted, a monstrous dictator that they almost certainly wouldn't have gotten if they hadn't very much wanted him. Surely that belongs among the lessons of the rise of Nazism--no? Are we to believe that a society's collective preference for brutal autocracy over liberal democracy has no correlation with its tendency to end up ruled by brutal autocrats?
Good reading. Thanks.
For a lot of this I found myself irresistibly drawn to parallels with Alexander Hamilton, another brash young people-pleasing orator ("let's get this guy in front of a crowd!") who'd be key to a revolution. To the extent that I was imagining the Broadway-style songs, the staging of the scenes set in parliament and the one set in prison, the brief scenes showing the national populace's fears and feelings, and so on.
Are there any major films or stage shows depicting the rise of Hitler? I feel like it could be done in a quite compelling way without at all endorsing him: similar to Star Wars episodes 2-3.
Well, there's "The Producers". 🙂
I thought of that as well, although it doesn’t really depict his rise does it? Clearly off topic, ahem…
"SPRING time . . .for HITLER. . ."
There's a movie from the early 2000s called "Max" about Hitler in 1919 as he's deciding between a career in art and in politics. John Cusack plays Max, a wealthy Jewish art dealer who thinks this Hitler kid just might have that special something it takes to get to the top of the modern art world. But Hitler decides that being dictator is more suitable for a Wagnerian total artist such as himself.
I presume the movie is largely fictional. It seems more like a Philosophy of Art exercise than actual history.
There was a 3 hour miniseries in 2003 called "Hitler-The Rise of Evil" that covers the historical record 1914-1934. The biggest name in the cast is Peter O'Toole as von Hindenburg. Robert Carlyle played Hitler.
There have probably been a number of other Young Hitler TV shows over the years.
I hurried up publishing my Substack on Hitler 1932-1933 when I saw this review. My take on Lessons is different. It's not "you need money to take over", but "you need guts, good strategists, and edgy but legal tricks to take over".
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
> What does it take to be literally Hitler? ... You remember Godwin’s law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia.
What if this is just fundamentally the wrong question? What if pattern-matching onto a singular historical episode is a fixation based on psychological trauma rather than a good way to navigate away from bad outcomes?
A good question to ask about all such comparisons: how well would the early Lenin or Mao map onto the thing I'm worrying about? If the thing matches Lenin and Mao, but not Hitler, am I deriving false comfort from the fact that it's "not Hitler?" Because those guys did plenty of mass murder, too.
Conversely, if the thing matches surface-level characteristics of Hitler (e.g., "displays swastikas") but absolutely none of the characteristics of "actually gains state power," am I freaking out about the equivalent of a hippie burning an American flag, i.e., a deliberate but empty provocation?
I think part of it is that there's a fair chunk of people who don't group Lenin and Mao with Hitler, and instead reference Franco and Mussolini. Hitler's the only one pretty much every agrees on.
But that's exactly part of the problem I'm pointing to, right? That people are strongly indexing on cultural elements that don't actually correlate with, you know, mass murder.
To spell that point out: Lenin and Mao committed far more mass murder than Franco or Mussolini, and yet people's indexing doesn't reflect that.
Well, perhaps they think some goals are worth the cost? Or perhaps they score highly on that "loyalty" axis, and don't want to call attention to the faults of people who, in some sense, are "on their side"? Or worst, maybe they think Lenin and Mao did nothing wrong.
I suppose they could think any of those things. But then, they would have zero moral high-ground. They would not actually be against mass murder, just when it's not for "their side." In which case, I have no interest in helping them figure whom they should be "worrying about."
Lenin and Mao also gave real, material benefits to broad swaths of the population for whom liberal "democracy" (I doubt that there really is such a thing, given the degree to which money controls politics) offers nothing but wage slavery
As a side note, the current standard recommendation for an up-to-date academically rigorous political history of Nazi Germany is Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy: "The Coming of the Third Reich" (up through 1933), "The Third Reich in Power" (1933-1939), and "The Third Reich at War" (1939-1945)
I must say, based on this description, there is at least one current developed-world political figure who reminds me a lot of 1920s Hitler. Openly illiberal as well as viciously racist, a strategically brawling thug happy to use violence to enhance his political appeal, thriving on crisis, skilled at increasing his power through aggressive negotiation with more traditional rightists who half-agree with him and think they can use him.
That figure is Itamar ben Gvir. If this review causes one change in how this blog's readership does contemporary politics, I hope it is to strengthen their support of the present Israeli protest movement, and to give more credence to those who analogize Otzma Yehudit to the NSDAP.
The most serious criticism levelled against him by his enemies is that he prayed at a location that Jews aren't allowed to. That strikes me as less "Hitler," and more "American Civil rights leader."
Here is some more info about Ben-Gvir:
"He is a lifelong activist against a state that Israelis have generally revered for much of the country’s history. By the age of 17, he was considered so dangerously subversive that he was disqualified from universal military service." (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/rise-itamar-ben-gvir-armin-rosen)
"[PM] Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist [in 1995]. Ben Gvir was not connected to the killing, though he campaigned for the assassin’s release from prison." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/israel-election-ben-gvir-netanyahu/)
"Number 8 on the URP list, Otzma’s Itamar Ben-Gvir, has a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, hanging in his home." (https://www.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/Netanyahus-deflection-of-his-involvement-with-Otzma-ANALYSIS-581666)
"On some critical issues, Otzma Yehudit appears to have staked positions even more extreme than the far-right parties troubling Europe, though Israel’s unique milieu limit direct comparisons... even the AfD does not advocate for the emigration of ethnic minority German citizens and the establishment of a government ministry to facilitate it, as Ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit do for Arab citizens of Israel." (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvirs-policy-goals-going-to-extremes-even-europes-far-right-wont-touch/)
"For decades, Ben Gvir was a political untouchable. His roots in the overtly racist Kach party — founded by a radical American rabbi, Meir Kahane, and banned by Israel — put him beyond the fringe of even the most right-wing parties." (WaPo article)
"Just three years ago, Netanyahu’s decision to cut a deal that could have resulted in him [Ben-Gvir] entering the Knesset was so alarming that even the normally tight-lipped pro-Israel lobby AIPAC weighed in against it. By early 2021, the Likud leader was courting Ben Gvir’s support for his right-religious alliance, while also branding him as “not fit” for ministerial office." (Times of Israel article)
These quotes, and especially that last one, have a few similarities to something I read recently. A book review, perhaps.
He's also spent a lot of time doing organizational work for domestic terrorists (e.g. driving a bunch of teenagers to an arab village and telling them to go do some property damage). He's had like eighteen investigations into him by shin bet (who are not, as a rule, particularly into investigating Jewish terrorism).
Even the part about having three elections in two years (and five elections in four) matches.
Ben-Gvir himself matches this but I don't think the rest of the situation does. There's not the same level of crisis as 1920s Germany (granted, this could change), and Netanyahu is much better than Hindenberg at siphoning off populist-right energy into (admittedly somewhat antiliberal) mainstream right (although if Netanyahu dies or retires, that leaves a power vacuum I can imagine Ben Gvir jumping into).
"Germans who mistakenly thought the communists were the real threat ultimately played into Hitler’s hand. "
"Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. "
How do we know that the Germans weren't right, and that if Hitler didn't win, the communists would? How do we know that the communists wouldn't have been even worse for Germany? Germany already had a failed communist revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_October
"This isn’t to say that Hitler never lied. He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions, after all."
Hitler may not have had much in socialist intentions, but the party absolutely did. As the review mentions, Strasser took the socialist part of national socialism very seriously. So did Röhm, leader of the SA, who kept calling for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth. It's partially for his socialism that Hitler got rid of him on the Night of the Long Knives.
“How would we know that X wouldn’t have been worse for Germany than Hitler?”
Is that actually the question you’re asking?
Yes, he seems to be asking exactly that question, and honestly I'm interested in the answer as well. If there's one thing studying history is convinced me, it's that the horrors of World War II were caused by a combination of Hitler and the circumstances of germany, and that it would have been fairly easy to swap somebody else into Hitler's position. You probably wouldn't have gotten the holocaust, but you definitely still would have gotten the war.
I'm not so sure. The idea of picking a fight with the entirety of Europe at once doesn't make a lot of sense unless you're hopped up on fascist "we're so manly that one of our soldiers is worth ten of theirs" nonsense. And I don't think that fascism in particular was inevitable, even if the Weimar government was doomed.
It's possible that a non-fascist government would still have gone to war, since lots of governments have tried for a "short victorious war" to solve their problems, but even then I'm not sure it was inevitable for that war to spread to all of Europe.
Trotsky believed in lighting the whole world on fire with socialist revolution. Had he beaten "socialism in one country" Stalin, it's easily possible that the USSR would have been even more aggressive and imperialistic than it already was, which is saying a lot because it was already one of the most aggressive and imperialistic powers in history. Now imagine if Trotsky, instead of being the head of backwards Russia, was the dictator of the far more technologically and economically advanced Germany.
Putting "whether or not they would've been worse" aside, do you think that, without Hitler and the Nazi party, the Communist party had the means to take over Germany?
It's hard to tell. Nearly nobody, not even most members of the Bolsheviks' Central Committee, thought the Bolsheviks had the means to take over Russia until they did. It was only due to Lenin's force of personality that he managed to harangue his colleagues into supporting an armed coup d'etat on 10 October 1917. In Germany, as this book review says, Schleicher and Hindenburg both thought they could control Hitler, but it turned out that Hitler controlled them instead.
The German electorate certainly thought that without the Nazis, a communist revolution would be imminent. Were they wrong? Maybe, but I don't know better than them. The Germans also thought fascists were preferable to communists. Were they wrong? If the fascists had been like Franco and the communists like Stalin, certainly not, but of course they got a far worse fascist than Franco.
How many people thought the nazis were remotely capable of taking power?
It's not just possible, it's quite likely. With a major communist power in central Europe, there's no saying what the USSR would have done. The soviets wanted all of Europe to be red, and mostly didn't go to war to accomplish this because they couldn't. And there's no reason that communist germany would have felt any different.
I don't think it's likely that X would have been worse for Germany than Hitler, but X could easily have had bad results (imagine a WW2 in which a communist Germany allies with the USSR against the west. Especially if as a consequence of not embracing antisemitism as much they keep all the Jewish scientists and get nukes first. Probably no holocaust but still quite bad!)
Yes. Stalin and Mao were each at least as terrible for their respective countries as Hitler was. If communists took over one of the most advanced economies in the world instead of backward places like Russia and China, who knows what damage they could have done?
It clearly should be asked. Especially in the context of "X would have been worse for the world?" A strong commie Germany-Russia union would have fairly easily occupied Europe.
When Hitler took over, the Army stayed neutral. The Army would have blocked the Communists if nobody else did. It would have been like the Spanish Civil War, except the German Left wouldn't have had enough of a militia to last even a year.
Given that the rise of Hitler led to Germany being bombed into ruins, occupied, and divided among the victors, things were going to have to go very badly indeed under the Communists to be worse. But I think it is entirely plausible that in most worlds where fascists of some kind didn't take power, communists of some kind would have, and that this would have been very bad.
For that matter, how do we know that Hitler's rise to power didn't prevent a smarter, saner, more competent fascist from taking over Germany and the rest of Europe? Maybe we'd be living in a predominantly fascist world if not for Hitler's fanaticism and incompetence.
Hell, how do we know that hostile extraterrestrial aliens wouldn't have invaded Earth in 1946 if WWII hadn't led to the development of the atomic bomb in 1945?
Simply put, we don't. One could come up with any number of "X would have been worse for Germany than Hitler" scenarios that are all, to varying degrees, within the realm of possibility. But those sorts of hypotheticals don't really prove much beyond "reality is complex and chaotic and completely unpredictable." Drawing any other sort of conclusion from them (e.g. "maybe Hitler wasn't so bad after all") would be a terrible mistake in judgment.
And one could just as easily go in the opposite direction too. For instance, how do we know that communism wouldn't have completely faded away by 1950 if Hitler hadn't forced the democratic nations into an alliance of necessity with the Soviet Union? Without WWII, it's a lot harder to see a path that leads to a nuclear USSR and a five decade Cold War.
Stellar. I'd love if you broke down the other three (five?) parts after the contest is over.
Besides Hitler, who has led a coup/rebellion that failed to take over a country, then took power through an election (or post-election coalition)?
-Charles Taylor in Liberia*
-Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
-Prachanda in Nepal
Anyone else?
* "He took 75% of the vote from a war-weary electorate desperate for an end to the violence. One of Mr Taylor's campaign slogans ran: 'He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.'" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/04/westafrica.qanda)
I'm guessing that Latin American history has more such examples.
The review:
Very solid. Clear, straightforward prose that summarized the book, and then extracted and analyzed the part that interested the reviewer, in the process successfully navigating an enormous minefield. I felt like it provided a rough picture of certain aspects of Hitler's personality, and I don't know how accurate that is, but it helped me make sense of it all.
I do think the reviewer should have looked into the last 64 years of scholarship, though, just to give their readers a bit of a head start.
The content:
If shadow cabinets are so bad, why does the UK have them? Isn't having one just a sign of a centrally-organized political party (unlike the main 2 in the USA)?
Like others here, I think the overtly-anti-democratic thing has had its day, and now people are on the lookout for that. I think whoever comes next will have adapted. Either the cult of personality will be so strong as to overwhelm attachment to democracy, or there'll be an ideology that contains anti-democratic elements. Not that that's much different from Hitler, either way. So I suppose this is more a criticism of that segment of the reviewer's analysis - there's no clear lines, no simple categories, and it's all a matter of degrees. Any ideology which looks at half the country and says "it's OK if they vote but it's ethically wrong if they win" is a problem.
Regarding the use of terror, I don't see why the reviewer refers to BLM rather than to Antifa. BLM, IMO, is just a group who're trying to claim they can steer the elephant of popular anger, and are largely ineffectual except at providing cover for other more organized groups to pursue their own agendas. Antifa is organized (somehow) and may actually have goals. As for Jan 6, I'm tired of discussing it with people who haven't watched 6 hours of the Parler footage on ProPublica's site, so I shall not mention it again.
I don't think it's had its day. It just surfaces in different ways now, usually demands for loyalty to institutions and "experts" (academics, who are ideologically homogenous). We saw this happen most clearly during COVID, which amounted to a popular totalitarian dictatorship by scientists (not really scientists) who claimed to provide far superior leadership to democratically elected politicians, the latter of whom stepped aside due to overwhelming public pressure to do so, in a Palpatine-esque "so this is how democracy dies" manner.
And so that's the real risk here. It's not a Hitler-like guy/gal who happens to make spectacular speeches and openly wants to become a dictator. There seems to be a distinct lack of those and no obvious candidates on the horizon. Some people think Trump is a match for this because he happens to get big turnouts for his speeches, but he clearly lacks any sort of dictator or takeover ideology. The threat is more from people who share Hitler's desire to "breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable". Most of the politics of that last ten years can be seen through the lens of the modern day left trying to achieve this dream of a society run by only the "elites" (ugh, hate that term), disembowelling democratic and market mechanisms along the way. The primary difference is that Hitler believed the elite would just be advisors to the one man who made the ultimate decisions, whereas modern leftism is more comfortable with siloed committees of specialists making decisions instead. My guess is that Hitler had little interest in that form of government because the issues he was interested in were simple and general enough that the idea of needing a committee of academics to figure out what to do would have sounded absurd.
Yes, the covid response was one of the things I had in mind. To clarify a bit, I think that the days of directly painting democracy as bad are about over (although hearing people talk about Brexit, maybe I'm wrong). Instead, the new tactic is that democracy is good, but some things are better and more important and take precedence, or alternatively that sometimes choices the people make are simply wrong and should not be allowed (which is in a sense the same thing, elevating their particular ethical standard above democracy).
It goes even further, as we see from the reaction to democracy in El Salvador, Brazil, Israel, and Hungary. People who hate democracy say democracy is good, but what democracy means is that technocrats needs to make the big political decisions, not elected officials, because those decisions are too important. And technocrats also need to make the little decisions, because they aren't important enough. Elections *must* be held, but their outcomes must not affect the smooth running of government.
Yeah, I have yet to hear a principled distinction between "democracy" and "populism" that doesn't rely on an external judgement that places some values higher than democracy.
And to be fair, I don't think democracy is the highest value, either. 50.1% of the voting population doesn't magically make the world perfect. But I do reserve the right to be extremely skeptical of people who put other things above democracy, especially when they claim that they aren't.
This reminds of that scene from "Yes [Prime] Minister" where he and the activist agree that the people can't be trusted to make decisions, even though they completely disagree on the direction of the correction. :-)
Judges are not "technocrats". For Israel the issue is that 1. Separation of powers is pretty important, mostly bc 2. If democratic legitimacy at time t grants unfettered power, there is no guarantee that the incumbents will not encroach at t+1, thus destroying democracy.
Which is exactly what happened in Hungary btw: Orban used his genuine majority to change the rules in such a way that talking about democracy *now* is a sad joke at best.
What is a judge but a law expert?
Separation of powers is useful, but often judges are used to infringe on democracy.
Brilliant review. Two points though:
1. Sound internal organisation is also a characteristic of good revolutions - vide the ANC in the anti-Apartheid struggle
2. "Spiritual terror" sounds a lot like the twitter mobs of today
If you combine the overt pressure of the Twitter mob crowd with the regime directed suppression of competing messages via security state organizations and sympathetic people in key social media organizations, then you have the modern "Spiritual Terror" formula.
Interesting how one guy with rocket and car companies blew much of that up, isn't it?
Interesting insights
"When he tested again in 1908, his drawings were so bad he was excluded from consideration. Crushed, Hitler went to the rector of the academy for an explanation. He was told that his test drawings showed he lacked aptitude for painting, but he was encouraged to apply to the Academy’s School of Architecture."
As an artist, Hitler could draw buildings well, but not people.
There's got to be a time travel story here. Nonviolent time traveller employs Hitler as a painter, has confederates buy his work to bid up the price, etc. He ends up too busy with his painting career for his remarkable oratory talents and nasty ideas to gain much power.
Germany ends up with some military dictatorship after the Weimar Republic collapses, Germany rearms but nobody implements any crazy plans to murder a bunch of good German citizens for being the wrong religion or ethnicity. Germany and the USSR eventually end up in a war that doesn't light the whole continent on fire, and Germany ends up getting some support from the British and French.
I've seen variants of this twice in alternative history novels:
In Turtledove's Great War series, one of the American viewpoint characters interacts with a German sergeant with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, who seems tough and competent, but weirdly obsessed with his hatred of Jews.
In L Neil Smith's and Scott Bieser's [i]Roswell, Texas[/i] graphic novel, Hitler shows up as an immigrant to the Texas Republic, who ends up as a prominent artist given to making embarrassing and offensive political rants from time to time. (But there are still Nazis, albeit mostly in England.)
I have read this book and its an excellent eye witness account of history. For me an even deeper understanding comes from The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh https://amzn.to/3YkwibV His early sections on the Nazi's rise and the way they established an authoritarian state are the best parts in my view.
Summarizing: if you think the problem with society is simply that the best people aren't in charge, you're at risk of becoming the next revolutionary. It seems Hitler's whole ideology, along with those of the communists, is all about a near-demented level of belief in some people just being way better than other people in all dimensions (intellectually, spiritually, morally...), and those people thus deserve to be in charge with democracy being a convoluted distraction.
Also: don't go on holiday in the middle of critical political moments.
This is not remotely a fair summary of communist beliefs. It's not even a fair summary of Marxist-Leninist beliefs.
Communists support democracy, hence all the socialist states with "democratic" in the name. What they question is whether the system found in liberal states - one characterized by significant wealth disparities and fixed-term politicians, nearly all of them from or funded by (and, communists argue, governing for) the wealthiest social strata, actually provides it.
Oh jeez. Can everyone please take it for granted that when we talk about the beliefs of Communists we're talking about beliefs inferred from their actual behaviour, not what they claim to believe?
They postulated democracy in the future (in theory) but for now (and in practice) they supported dictatorship of the proletariat and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism “the most class-conscious and politically "advanced" sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form organizations to advance the objectives of communism”
Well shucks, obviously if they put the word "democratic" in the name of their country they obviously love and practice democracy! How could I have been so blind!
Communists have little in common with the variously titularly socialist parties that have some influence in European democracies. And there are no actual socialist states I can think of in the world today. There are some that have stronger controls on capitalism and harness markets as a force for the general welfare, but having a more progressive tax structure, strong unions, and universal healthcare is a long way from "the workers control the means of production."
Has Venezuela un-nationalized their industries yet?
Does Venezuela even pretend to be a socialist country? Haven't followed developments there as closely as I maybe should. All I really know is that instead of the workers controlling the means of production, they seem to be fleeing to neighboring countries as fast as possible. State control doesn't mean socialism AFAIK.
Weird then that literal marxists were furiously celebrating Chavez
who? The Cubans, maybe? IDK. None of the marxists I'm familiar with. Also, Marxist != socialism. All Marxists are socialists, not all socialists are Marxists (probably not a majority, but IDK).
>This is not remotely a fair summary of communist beliefs. It's not even a fair summary of Marxist-Leninist beliefs.
This is LITERALLY what the CPUSA was in the early 20th century
Perhaps they didn't think that differences in ability were inherent, but they absolutely considered themselves the elites were wise and compassionate enough to remake society.
Nicely told. Congratulations for taking on Godwin's Law and winning!
Based solely on the 5 points in section IV, which barely known modern political figures have a chance to take over a democracy like that?
>The terror has to be wielded strategically to advance the movement’s political aims
How did/would they do that?
> After one of his rants had come to the attention of some officers in the army, he was “posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.”
I'm confused - they wanted to combat democracy, but viewed their role as serving a democratic republic?
It's almost as if the German General Staff in 1919 wasn't wholly supportive of the new Social Democratic government that they'd handed things over to in November 1918.
Think about it - Australia is a democracy, but it's part of the Commonwealth under the King (now). Some people want to make Australia a Republic and dump the monarchy.
Who is more 'democratic' there? If a republic is more democratic than a constitutional monarchy, and you are opposed to the idea of a republic, aren't you opposed to democracy?
Nobody *today* is likely to come out and say "I am opposed to democracy" in a Western-style political establishment, but there are degrees of democracy you may support or oppose.
For me, the interesting issue is The Great Man Theory of History--- In 1840 Thomas Carlyle said, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” But this view went out of style around the time of Darwin and Marx, replaced with a model of interconnected social relationships as the cause of social change.
But from the evolutionary sociology perspective, I wonder if peoples’ strong attraction to charismatic leaders comes from the times when it was adaptive behavior in intertribal conflict. It’s as if evolutionary mechanisms include ‘path dependency’ in the evolution of complex systems.
It’s hard to believe that today’s world wouldn’t be very different absent Muhammad.
>To achieve all this, Hitler concocted a piece of legislation known as the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich.
I guess the phenomenon of crafting obviously BS nice-sounding names for monstrous laws is older than I thought. He should have just called it the Patriot Act and been done with it.
I appreciated the detailed exposition of the lead up to Hitler achieving his goal, which is the part of the book the reviewer chose to focus on. I have to admit that I have a rather selfish reason for that though; I have always meant to read that book and now I don’t feel nearly as compelled to. I enjoyed it.
As to the deeper issue, I thought it really brought into relief the “Swiss cheese problem” nature of these things. It gave me something to think about.
What I have read here is more or less "old and known" - thanks to public eduction in Germany.
The ideas that "Hitler was an incredibly talented speaker" and "the first German democracy was doomed anyway" have been used as a defense by former Nazis. They should be taken with a grain of salt.
What I find worth adding to the picture:
- Despite all instabilities, the Republic of Weimar also had 5 good years. The economy recovered, there was progress in art and science, Germany's post-WWI isolation ended in slow steps. Apart from the question "How could Hitler come to power?", I find it worthwhile asking "Why did the first German democracy fail?" and "Why did the second German democracy NOT fail, given that there were former Nazis and even SS member in key positions in justice and administration?"
- Ludendorff and Hindenburg were supreme army commanders (OHL) during WWI. They are responsible for a lot of the slaughter and the continuation of the war when it was clearly not going anywhere. Their stubbornness triggered uprisings in the army. Later on, to blame their failure on others, Hindenburg used a conspiracy theory ("Dolchstoßlegende") saying that the German army had been undefeated in open battle but backstabbed by socialists/Jews/you name it.
- Large parts of the elites were directly against democracy. Democracy was seen as "bowing to the enemy", "weakening Germany" or "being unpatriotic".
- As the loser of WWI, Germany depended on its former enemies which could either support or weaken political stability. France weakened it by occupying the Ruhr region in 1923. Foreign debt being called in weakened it again after 1929.
- While "the old system" had plenty of love, there was not a lot for democracy, and even its proponents had little experience in it and did big mistakes (bypassing parliament, letting people alone in times of hardship). That the constitution permitted letting a government fail without installing a new one (constructive vote of mistrust), did not help.
Two elements that look like antidemocratic / typical Nazi stuff but were done by others as well:
- Political murders happened in post-WWI Germany without the involvement of the Nazis, but often involving former army units. Even the new democratic government was involved in the murder of prominent communist figures Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919.
- Even the democratic powers had their own uniformed troops (Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold).
P.S.: Two elements that are obviously wrong but were a common pattern:
- Democracies turning into dictatorships or at least right-wing authoritarian regimes was the trend in 1930's Europe (somewhere earlier, see Italy).
- Antisemitism was a tradition in Germany and other parts of Europe.
So the question here is not "How do you spot the next Hitler?" but "How do you turn around a general phenomenon (not a singularity)?"
Do you think it was guaranteed that the Weimar republic would fail? It seems like there were a ton of places where Hitler might have been prevented from rising to power, but without Hitler, could the republic have muddled through and eventually reached some level of stability?
Absolutely not - I find the view that "this system was doomed to fail" cheap and easy. It was used by people to defend their support or obedience. It is also a welcome argument for authoritarians themselves ("this shaky democracy cannot survive anyway; therefore, it is best if we overthrow it"). I would rather remind people what progress Germany had made in a couple of years after having been a backward looking country for decades. On a small, cultural scale, look at furniture design from the 20s - some of the chairs could be from the 80s. How was it possible that this progress was made in such a short amount of time? On a larger political scale: How was it possible that democracy seemed to work between 1924-1929? / The question why the Weimar Republic failed has been discussed extensively. I like the view that while no single reason alone could sink the ship, the combination of all of them was too much. / An extremist with rethoric talent will not find an easy audience during good times (or at least ok ones). The last democrats in charge themselves did not believe in democracy (overruling the parliament and dissolving it when needed) - what message does this send? Plus, millions without food, hope and a place in society - that is always a powder keg for a system. This would be my main lesson from that time: If you abandon large parts of the population, it will eventually backfire. / Check history before Brüning: How did Hermann Müller's chancellorship end? The parties could not agree on jobless insurance. Yes, this is how parliamentary democracy ended in Germany. It was that trivial. / So, overall, I would look at the power of democracies that did not fail and would rather ask: How many "Hitlers in the making" have democracies prevented?
Addendum: Nothing in human society is ever "doomed to fail/succeed/certainly going to happen". Shirer himself did not see the end of the Weimar Republic coming when he was a journalist in Germany before the Nazi takeover.
Things that for historians look like they "inevitably" would happen is in reality just one of innumerable things that could have happened, with varying degrees of probability. Sometimes something everyone regards as extremely improbable (Shirer's assessment of Hitler's chanches of ever gaining power in his writings before 1934) is what ends up happening. Related to this, the impact of coincidences for what happens in an life and in a society, is vastly underrated.
This vast openness to what may happen tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, is the stuff life is made of. That's what makes life alive.
The study of history, by contrast, in the study of life after all life has been taken out of it.
The reason Hitler was transparent about his illiberalism was that he was in the Weimar Republic, where democracy had few friends and the main alternative was Communism. In the US and other Western democracies, democracy is a religion, so being openly anti democratic would be a big mistake. Aspiring dictators in the West claim, instead, to be realising democracy more fully (see Trump, Hungary, Turkey, Israel under its current government, etc.) Specifically, their claim is that limits on their power make a mockery of democracy, giving control instead to a Deep State of shadowy elites. Incidentally, you can see that Hitler gave lip service to the sacred cows of his time. The public in the Weimar Republic was mostly socialist or even communist. So the Nazi party is not simply the German National Party, but the German National Socialist Worker's Party.
A bit pink, and lacking a summary of key points which would turn it into a good analysis, but a useful summary of events.
"His transparency on this point makes practical sense. The purpose of creating a mass movement, like Hitler did, is to get a segment of the population that’s actually on your side. If you build your coalition pretending to love liberalism and then unveil the plot twist that you’re totally against it, you’re going to damage your base of support."
A decent point, but there's an endrun around this, in that you can gradually redefine what the value you're trumpeting means, and count on group cohesion to make your followers justify it to themselves later. You can loudly trumpet how much you cherish "democracy" in some reverential quasi-religious way, treat voting like a sacred civic ritual, and then gradually redefine democracy to include your vision of a massive authoritarian bureaucracy that makes all decisions about every facet of a citizen's life and say it's still "democracy" because there's voting. All the maneuvering in American politics around the concepts of equity and equality are basically ways to get somebody to commit to a vague ideal with positive connotations, then redefine the ideal to mean something they wouldn't have signed onto originally, and hope the people who openly supported it feel compelled to ride along with the change or even feel compelled to defend each evolution of it.
If a country makes the same stupid mistake twice under two entirely different political regimes, we have to conclude that the problem with that country is that its people harbour an absurd belief regarding what might make them richer and more secure. Germany and Japan had won wars in the late Nineteenth Century which enabled them to go on the gold standard. But both were vulnerable to a 'capital strike' by the Britain and France and, a little later, the USA which were sitting on a mountain of cash. One cause of the First World War was the German belief that the French were trying to wreck their Stock Market as a response to Agadir. Another problem was that German economists (but also JM Keynes) believed that diminishing returns to global agriculture were setting in and that Germany was vulnerable to starvation unless it acquired land to its East. Thus the German people backed the Army's maximal program.
Why did Germany turn into a Dictatorship rather than have a military regime? A big part of the answer is the psychological impact of the collapse of Empires and the failure of Constitutional Monarchies (e.g. Spain). A Dictator-for-Life who could dismiss fractious Parliaments (more particularly if they were elected under Proportional Representation) was a good replacement for the Crowned Head.
What about totalitarian cadre based political parties? Why did they suddenly sprout up? One answer is mimetics. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had succeeded in defeating the Allies and the White Armies. Mussolini, in Italy, was seen as a slightly saner D'Annunzio and once he'd struck a deal with the Papacy, there was an obvious 'demonstration effect' for South Germany. Hitler, a Catholic by birth, wasn't anti-Catholic like the nutter Ludendorff. It must also be said that other right-wing German politicians were deeply flawed. General Schliecher didn't get on with Gen. Blomberg. The Strassers proved inept. Bruning seems to have been a fantasist. The SDs were a house divided and suffered most from the attacks of the Communists. Come to think of it, the Communist strategy succeeded in that they did get to be the boss of East Germany till Gorbachev tanked the Soviet Union.
Hitler seems to have had unusual powers as an orator and he certainly was ruthless in killing his own people. That's a good thing. The only thing worse than a murderous gangster is a murderous gangster who doesn't slaughter any of his own people who step out of line.
Whatever his political- or criminal- skill, the fact Hitler was brought into politics by the Army. First Ludendorff and then Schleicher and Blomberg helped his rise. Hitler carried out the General Staff's maximal program better than they could themselves have done. But it was a stupid program doomed to fail.
"He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions"
Common misunderstanding. The party was very socialist in the meaning of the word at that time: it wanted to organize society like one big company towards a common set of purposes (in this case national glory). Hayek's Road to Serfdom is a book aimed at criticizing socialism, and it mainly focuses on Hitler. Hayek later expressed frustration that the word changed meaning after he published it. Funny how much confusion this creates today when people see it in the Nazi title.
Nope, the chance to avoid 'boy cried hitler' has long passed. It is 100% rational to completely ignore any and all claims that so and so remotely right-wing political figure is a new Hitler because virtually 100% of the times that this has been said in the past have been acts of bold faced propaganda or hysterical nonsense.