Today’s post is from Stephen L. Hall. I think this is one of the best posts ever featured on Freedom Reconnection, and the timing is perfect since tomorrow is super Tuesday. Thank you, Stephen.
***
A few years back, for a little light reading, I was perusing Mein Kampf over the course of several weeks. Many valuable things can be learned from that book in understanding not only the politics and history of its author but the political and social dynamics of the age and time wherein it was writ.
Scholars often both over-estimate and under-estimate the political acumen and sheer genius of the book’s author. But most of what people would want to understand is right there in his writings if the reader but pays attention without the emotional judgments of hindsight and the political and intellectual spin of the author’s detractors.
Before we get too far into the thoughts I am anxious to address, the reader should take note to dismiss their preconceptions and emotional reactions. No man is ever as bad nor as good as their reputation and the public image are want to portray. Harder still is to view the world through another’s perspective.
Austrians, like Adolf, are Germans. When the German states were for hundreds of years trying to unify into a single country Austria was the leading candidate to be able to unify the German people. However, it was the emergent state of Prussia which would unify Germans into a proper nation. But Austria, a powerful state in its own right, being left out of German unification, expanded its power east and south incorporating the nation of Hungary along with a couple other small nations.
Adolf grew up in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, a very ethnically divided country and a very politically and culturally divided country; German, Mygar (also known as Huns, from which we get the country Hungary), Czechs, and Slavs. As he talked about in his book, it was a country ahead of its time in embracing what we would now call multiculturalism. The royal family of the empire were German, but it appeared to many Austrians that undue favoritism was being given to the Czechs in particular.
Adolf opposed such multiculturalism and thought the government should be trying to Germanize the other groups rather than giving them preference in government jobs at a time when many Austrians were struggling to find work. As history would bear out, after The Great War the empire was broken apart along those very racial lines by France, England, Russia, and America.
We know that Adolf joined a small fringe political party and helped take it to national prominence then to a complete dictatorial position of power. We also know that it was a political party built upon socialist economics, ethnic unity, and cultural identity. Nazi is short for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) auf Deutsch (in German).
Mein Kampf reveals that much of Adolf’s vaulted political genius was usually just adopted, or as the modern US leftists would say, culturally misappropriated, from other people and political parties of the day. What we think about when we discuss as the “Nazi” path to power was basically not any different from what anyone else was doing at the time. Being national socialist, most of his tactics were simply copied from the communist socialists.
We’ve all seen the party posters and flyers in bold red, white, and black, but that was directly copied in both color and style from the communist posters and flyers, which were red and white. The Nazis just added black to add contrast.
The most emblematic symbol of Nazis, the swastika symbol, was used ubiquitously, because the communists plastered the hammer and cycle every place they could. The communists had a white hammer and cycle on their big red flag; the Nazis put a big swastika on their red, white, and black flag.
Beer hall rallies and street demonstrations marked the early days of the Nazi movement only because such rallies and demonstrations were the mainstays of the communists. Even the violence, fighting, and intimidation endemic to these demonstrations the Nazis learned by imitating the common practices of the communists.
Everything we associate in imagery with the Nazis in Germany, they learned from other socialists in Russia and in Italy. To show their power, they pushed for bigger demonstrations, bolder posters, stronger language. In his own words, if the communists sent men to bust up their meetings and crack skulls, they would have more men who would be in position to jump in and be more violent.
On the German cultural level: Prussia unified Germany; Prussia was the country of the Teutonic Knights; Hitler would famously have paintings of himself as a knight; Himler would call his SS a new knightly order. The party projected images of idealized German heritage, while casting the communists as foreign, a Jewish/Russian conspiracy to keep down the German.
The national socialist party was first and foremost the anti-international socialist party, Nazis were anti-communists. People fail to understand that the Nazis did not come to power as a socialist movement; they were a reaction to a communist movement, a German counter movement. Adolf touted his party’s agenda as a socialism for the German people, not a socialism controlled by foreign interests.
Today’s politicians have adopted many of these same practices while other practices have fallen out of common usage. Beer hall rallies and parades have been replaced with political rallies, posters and pamphlets have given way to commercials, websites, and tweets. Physical brawlers have given room for rumors, false reports, faked testimonials, and even threats of lawsuits. Even the adoption of personal and party political symbols has become common place.
It was reading all of this that I began to realize that the real danger to America was not the Democrat party being leftist as much as the real danger of a reactionary movement. Germany fell to socialists because two socialist parties openly fought each other making the whole country unstable. A reactionary party opposing the Democrats’ socialist tendencies would gain popular support politically and culturally.
An avowed socialist is running for President in America. His competitor can’t articulate any difference between a Democrat and a socialist. Opposed to them emerges a reactionary candidate who also supports socialized medicine and government subsidies, but only for Americans. No socialist handouts to foreigners, only for Americans. A socialism for the American people.
Nazis did not rise to power in a vacuum, they rose to power as an opposition party. It was the rebound effect that made the German people willing to accept what we look at and say no one would ever be willing to allow.
The people were in the midst of the Great Depression suffering record high unemployment and hyper-inflation, after having lost The Great War and suffered the ignominiously of the Treaty of Versailles, which placed the entire blame and cost of the war on the German people. Hitler promised to restore Germany, to rebuild Germany, essentially to make Germany great again.
Sound familiar?
After suffering through what has been termed The Great Recession, Americans have the lowest employment rate in forty years, has suffered humiliating reversals in Iraq and Afghanistan while being embarrassed by Obama’s tepid response to intimidation tactics of Russia, China, North Korea, & Iran. Trump is now promising to “make America great again.”
Hitler promised many of the socialist spending programs, such as welfare and public education, that America has already adopted both before and after WWII. But one thing the Nazis promised was guaranteed health care provided by the government. Trump supports a single payer universal health care system.
Hitler complains about a wealthy media which he said undermined not only the war effort but corrupted German while surreptitiously politically funding and supporting the Communist Party. He saw the same people behind the media also supporting the Communists striving to make Germany subordinate to foreign powers, an international follower, not a leader.
Trump complains about the Democrats being beholden to the wealthy interests and opposed an acknowledged biased left media. America has a political and wealthy elite who keep pushing America to emulate socialist nations of Europe and subordinate American interests to the direction of the international community and the United Nations.
The Nazis faced a Communist Party which also promised to make the workers’ lives better by seizing the property of the richest and redistributing their wealth. The Nazis went further promising also to bring back factories and jobs which had been exported to Russia, actually moving whole factories and equipment.
Trump faces a Democrat Party which embraces socialist redistribution of the accumulated wealth of the 1%ers, and increased taxes on the corporations and the wealthy. Trump is promising to bring back manufacturing jobs which have been encouraged to relocate in China and Mexico, moving whole factories overseas.
Germans had a history of authoritarianism exemplified by Chancellor Hindenberg. But being used to one authoritarian who tended to brush aside the law, the German people did not object too loudly when the next Chancellor Hitler behaved also in an authoritarian manner and tended to brush aside the law.
America has experienced two terms of a President Obama who has acted exceedingly authoritarian with a complicit Democrat Party which not only would not check the unlawful actions of the President, but actively thwarted political opponents from opposing an authoritarian President. Would the people expect any different behavior from a President Trump.
Hitler copied the oratory stylings of Mussolini and Lenin with strong words backed up with strong physical gestures. It was the boldness and audacity of Hitler’s speeches projecting strength and success which appealed not only to his party but to the German people.
Talking with supporters of Trump, they are most impressed with his projection of strength and success, encouraged by the boldness and raw emotion of his pronouncements about national security and rebuilding the economy. They interpret his hurling insults and making outrageous demands and claims as strength and force of will. It make them sure he will be successful.
Hitler brought the German people together along the lines of ethnic identity, and used ethnic minorities, Jews, Poles, and Gypsies, as scapegoats for the problems the people were dealing with in their own personal lives.
Trump has built his campaign around keeping out immigrants and Muslim extremists out of the country. Trump has received endorsements from a number of white supremacist groups, and personally retweeted posts from numerous supporters linked to those groups. Racial animosity is increasingly fueling the supporters of his campaign.
Nazis copied underhanded political tactics that they copied from the Communists as described earlier. Trump supporters have already been caught employing dirty tricks which have very often before been attributed to the Democrats.
I have been seeing disturbing parallels in America which I was convinced could never happen in America because we did not share the same history as Germany.
