Yet would people have been able to choose their faith over the state? I’m not so sure.
And the fact that he was coalition building before the take over indicates that he was using those connections for his own personal gain.
I’m not arguing that Hitler was an atheist, but that he put the German nation ahead of all other considerations. He was fine with the church as long as it was subordinated to the state and nation. Plus, should we always take Hitler at his word? What details I know of the Nazi state (from the few books I’ve read and the couple of classes I’ve taken) seem to amount to its basic irrational nature, based on the whims of Hitler as dictator and the system he set up to “purify” the german people.
Yeah they were able to. Although the Nazis started their New Age Nordic “German Faith Movement” it never really caught on at all outside the SS.
Keep in mind that the Germans swore oaths to just about everything and would practically die before breaking a oath, so few of them were willing to actually leave their church.
I don’t see that as cyclical. I agree with continuity, but I don’t agree with the notion of cyclical history. You’re example there is more a unified narrative of a singular topic - race in America. The rise of slavery in the British colonies were not from the same cause as the rise of Jim Crow in the US, even if there is a narrative that connects them. Saying “racism” to describe both would be ahistorical. It’s race that grows out of slavery, not the other way around. And Jim Crow, in part grows out of racism.
But it was something that differentiated themselves from the masses of Germans - they were elitists and likely saw the usefulness in religious faith (and the mass media, consumer culture, etc) in controlling the masses.
It seems cyclical because certain ideas seem to “work” for particular kinds of societies, so as (different) societies develop, certain ideas seem to “come around again” in textbook histories of different societies. So in the case of eugenics, it was an Anglo-American idea, an American program, but it wasn’t adapted to American or B. Imperial governance. Instead, eugenics took hold as a dominant idea in Cen. Eur. There was room in Europe for that kind of ideologically based identification and subjection of The Other to become dominant, while the U.S. was a better-developed republic than even France by then.
I think that’s where the confusion is. I used to think in terms of cycles as well, then I thought of it as helical (same ideas coming around in an opportunistic sense as “civilization” progressed linearly). Now I’ve settled on the physical analogy of “shitshow”.
But it DID take hold in America - it’s the American racial state, backed by state and federal power. Eugenics was used to discuss all sorts of issues in American life and all sorts of programs emerged out of the eugenics movement. I have a friend who is in her dissertation even illustrating how it shaped American feminism and spiritualism. Just because it didn’t lead to the holocaust, doesn’t mean it didn’t impact US culture and society or even lead to violence - policies that continued to destroy Native Amrerican culture, the 1924 immigration law, the epidemic of lynching in the first half of the 20th century - all driven by Eugenic thought. I could give you the same for British imperial policy. It never led to a direct genocide, but Mike Davis argues British policy amounted to the same. I’ve heard it argued that what outraged people about Hitler’s acts was not the that he was rounding up people and putting them in camps and then killing them, but that he was doing it to Europeans. The British had used concentration camps in the first world war, in their colonies, etc. It was not a new invention by the Nazis by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, he thought he could get away with the destruction of the Jewish people because the Ottomans nearly succeeded in doing that to the Armenians - and no one cared!
Regardless, the point I’m making is that this is not “cyclical” in the sense that it’s history repeating (which you seem to agree with), but that it’s a familiar idea being used in a new way.
Ha! Yeah… I totally agree there. History is a “shitshow”.
Fascism isn’t cyclical - it’s a constant., and it’s capable of rapid growth whenever conditions are favorable. Especially when we have the well tested scripts ready to be dusted off.
Umberto Eco (who wrote “The Name Of The Rose” which was like “The DeVinci Code”) grew up under Mussolini and he wrote a classic essay on eternal Fascism “Ur-Fascism” in 1995. He listed fourteen conditions that would characterize a Fascist movement. Note that in 1995 there was not a frustrated middle class (there is now) and there was no Cult Of Heroic Death (while now we have all these goobers with AK’s fantasizing about “going out in a blaze of glory.”)
He posed the question:
We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say the “They” must not do it again.
But who are They?
And he listed 14 points by which they can be identified:
Fascism is the cult of tradition…dreaming of a revelation…concealed under the veil of forgotten languages…we can only keep interpreting its obscure message
Rejection of Modernism…ideology based on Blood and Earth (Blut and Boden)…the Age of reason is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Cult of action for action’s sake…distrust of the intellectual world
Disagreement is Treason
Fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against intruders.
Appeal to a frustrated middle class
Obsession with a plot
Followers must feel humiliated…must be convinces they can overwhelm the enemies…continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, (their) enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
life is permanent warfare…an Armageddon complex…there must be a final battle
Contempt for the weak…every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the memebers of the party are…the best citizens
Cult of Heroic Death
Condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits
Selective populism…There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be represented and accepted as the Voice of the People…we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary government.
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak…impoverished vocabulary and syntax to limit complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
It is true that the understanding of the past is limited because all of the things you said, that the truth is refracted through a series of differing perspectives before it even gets recorded. However, for the sake of not repeating the same terrible mistakes over and over, it is worth looking for universals. The “continuities” that you mention are exactly what I am referring to.
It is also true that each historical period carries with it a different set of values, a different social/political/economic structure, a different intellectual paradigm, but people, on some level, think and act the same way. That means slavery is always wrong, even as a pillar propping up the economy of Ancient Rome and the Pre-Civil War American South. That means retributive justice is ineffective, whether it’s in the form of a Norse blood feud or the modern penal system. I am oversimplifying, but I want people to become better by overcoming their nature, rather than waiting for progress to catch up.
Michael Brown isn’t the first unarmed young black man to be unjustly killed. Neither was Trayvon Martin, nor Oscar Grant, nor Amadou Diallo. Neither is the recent situation in Gaza the first tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do not profess to understand the minutia of everything that happened in each of these events, but I would prefer that we strive for the (historical) awareness necessary to avoid them.
And what are those important universals? And who gets to define them? Us, the west, Americans, whoever the reigning power is?
How can we know that? Their actions might seem similar, but it’s an act of magic to know what people are thinking and what is motivating their actions, even of our contemporaries, much less people from the distant past.
I think we can all agree there, but motivations, circumstances, culture, all that matters in understand how and why things were the way they were - which, frankly, we’re not really sure about. We’re still judging from our privileged vantage point. That doesn’t mean we can’t make judgements on history - we can still say “slavery is always wrong”, eve as we understand the differences.
No one does, so you’re not remotely alone. And if someone tells you they know it all, be skeptical!
Agreed! We’re only going to get there with some good, rigorous education though. And lots of empathy.
Not that I’d imagine I’m clever enough to second guess Umberto Eco, but I have to disagree with at least a couple of his (and your) points… at least the one about fascism being constant and utterly rejecting modernity. I think that it’s another purerly modern invention, in reaction to specific historical events. And I’d argue that it’s selectively rejecting modernity. The fascists were pretty keen on adapting modern technologies and mass society when it suited their aims. Italian Futurists were some early supports of the Fascist movement. They created a version of national history which had little to do with the historical past. Mussolini made pains to connect Italy with ancient Rome, while the Germans certainly pulled on a mythical German identity as well.
I see fascism as only being possible with the modern state, mass media, and other forms of social control, even as it constructs a mythical past, it is projecting it onto a “glorious” future.
Keep in mind that Eco was actually there living under Mussolini.
Fascism seems to have themes of national “decline” and decay and promises to return the lost Golden Age that existed before the filthy immigrant ruined everything for the white man and women still knew their place. That was the populist (volkish) message, but not an economic policy. And the modern aspects which they embraced were largely determined by ideology and the ideological purity of the source rather than reason (and the Russian fell into the same trap at times)
Marx on the other hand wasn’t what we’d call an economist, I’d describe his as a “futurist” who had his own brand of economic determinism. To be fair, his track record has been better than most of current economic experts.
Fair enough, but sometimes people living through something are not the best judges of all it’s characteristics that we might be able to understand after the fact.
Right, but they used modern media to get that done. Again, I’m not sure why we should take their rhetoric at face value. Their propaganda pieces are not the totality of what they were. Goebbels, especially embraced mass media and the notion of the spectacle in service to the regime aims. Mussolini did as well. Both regimes used film masterfully (Triumph of the Will is pretty disgusting, but it’s also a masterpiece of film making). The Germans were keen to brand EVERYTHING… one of my profs wrote a book about Christmas in Germany, and the chapter on the Nazi era illustrated how they sold all sorts of things - including Nazi-theme christmas trees. I’d argue the rhetoric of the glorious past was in service to the building of the future, which made the Futurists a good fit for the Italian regime.
Because the field didn’t exist. I think Marx thought of himself as an historian and as studying political economy, sort of merging Hegel and Smith, while turning both on his head.
Marx was great at describing how capitalism was unfolding, but his futurist projections sucked. I part hard on the notion of teleology and stages of history, actually, on the ability to understand what is going to happen.
But why do you keep bringing up Marx? What does he really have to do with it, other than providing a foil for the fascists? I find it sort of irrelevant to the discuss at hand.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:119, topic:39247”]
Right, but they used modern media to get that done. Again, I’m not sure why we should take their rhetoric at face value.
[/quote]They had at least three different stream of propaganda - propaganda directed at the east, propaganda directed at the west, and internal propaganda. They weren’t always in agreement, and none of them were very truthful, but the internal propaganda was the basis of their early popular support. It reflects less on the Nazi’s plans and more on the state of mind of the public.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:119, topic:39247”]
But why do you keep bringing up Marx? What does he really have to do with it, other than providing a foil for the fascists? I find it sort of irrelevant to the discuss at hand.
[/quote]There was a guy upthread making silly wingnut assertions about Hitler the leftist. And it helps to focus on what shaped the Nazis as a reaction against Marxism.
That’s true… my point was more about the medium and how that shapes the message. It’s inherently mass, because they used mass media. The medium is the message, etc, etc.
I read those… ugh. So wrong. And true enough about reaction, but it was also a reaction to liberalism, democracy, and the failures of both in light of the depression. Marxism was likely a strong foil because of the Soviet Union. If Russia had had a different system, I wonder if that would have been the touchstone?
