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.
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...