Tom Gregg
Tom Gregg
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

To learn anything from history one needs first to learn some history. I mean the real thing, and in considerable detail. But that’s such hard work and there aren’t many people willing to undertake it, which accounts for the popularity, on Medium and elsewhere, of bumper-sticker history: America is Weimar Germany & etc.

Mr. Haque’s explanation for the rise of Hitler & Co. has all the depth of a puddle in the parking lot. In fact, the coming of the Third Reich was the product of both long-range and short-term factors: the former deep rooted in German history, the latter the product of a particular moment in time.

Authoritarianism, the first cousin of fascism, was a dominant theme in German politics and society long before the country was unified in 1870. For a moment in 1848–49 it seemed possible that German unification would go hand in hand with liberalism, but those hopes were soon snuffed out. Unification when it came was under the leadership of Prussia, with Bismarck pulling the strings. The polity he fashioned was merely authoritarianism disguised by the forms of representative government.

Looking at the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the German Republic faltered and collapsed, the serious student of history will be struck by one salient fact: that Republic had never succeeded in establishing its legitimacy in the eyes of the German people, a considerable percentage of whom regarded it with dislike and disgust as the symbol of defeat, shame and dishonor. Key groups — the Army officer corps, the professional civil service, the judiciary — never accepted the Republic in their hearts. In 1918–19 they had made common cause with the Social Democrats, founders of the Republic, only in order to stave off a feared communist revolution. And they looked forward to a time when the Republic would be replaced by an authoritarian regime, possibly under a restored monarchy.

When the terminal crisis came, the Republic was further crippled by the fracture of the broad Left. Between them the Social Democrats and the Communists commanded enough support to form a governing majority. But the latter, on orders from Moscow, refused to collaborate with the SDs, whom they reviled as “social fascists.” The Communists deluded themselves that Hitler represented the final, fatal phase of capitalism, and that revolution was just around the corner. There being no possibility of forming a governing majority, the Republic essentially fell apart. The Reichstag became impotent and a succession of unstable governments ruled by presidential decree. When Hitler came to power, it only remained for him to sweep away the residue of a liberal democratic regime that was already defunct.

As for Hitler and National Socialism, it was really the disastrous, for Germany, outcome of the Great War that gave him his political opportunity. All the grievances deriving from that defeat were encapsulated in the “Shame of Versailles,” as the Nazis called the 1919 Peace Treaty: Germany was disarmed, shorn of territory and colonies, branded with war guilt, burdened with reparations, saddled with a government led by the “November criminals” who, supposedly, had stabbed the heroic German Army in the back and sold out the nation to its enemies. And on the heels of Versailles came the ruinous postwar inflation, which destroyed all normal values and practically wiped out the German middle class. Even Germans who disliked the Nazis’ anti-communism and rabid anti-Semitism found much to support in the Nazi platform, and this is key to understanding Hitler’s success. His political program was ready made for him by the war in which he’d served as a common soldier.

Contemporary America, for all its problems, has nothing in common with late Weimar Germany. This can easily be verified by comparing Mr. Haque’s over-the-top rhetoric…

A fallen empire, in which people who expected lives of plenty now live at the edge of ruin, wracked by inflation and debt. A bellowing demagogue, who promises to make fallen middle classes great again. Nazis rising to power — while being glorified, legitimized, and by media, who coddles and promotes them, in the guise of “questioning” them. Demonization and scapegoating. Dehumanization and expropriation. Pseudoscience. The wheels of the state becoming machines to cleanse away the impure — so the soil belongs only to the pure, the strong, and the true.

…with what anyone can see by looking out the window. The fact that he feels compelled to resort to such absurd flights of hyperbole shows how little confidence he actually has in his own argument—which is to history what Twinkies are to nutrition.

    Tom Gregg

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    Tom Gregg

    I write & publish on Medium short stories, poetry, essays, commentary, reviews & more.