Durbin and the Nazis

Thank God for Dick Durbin.  It's been far too long since anyone in Congress - particularly Democrats - spoke so bluntly about the Iraq war and its aftermath.  Of course the right-wing commentariat, like the sniveling little attack chihuahuas they are, are up in arms about Durbin's apparent comparison between American soldiers and the Nazis - to do otherwise would bet to admit some guilt, some culpability for the torture some soldiers ARE committing.  But since they are focusing on the comparison, it's worth stepping back for a moment and considering just how Germany became Nazi some 70 years ago.

In a nutshell, the Germans after WWI were an honorable people and, though brutal at times during that war (as were the British in their various campaigns in the 19th century) had not adopted a culture of brutality.  That is, they had not until being swayed by a relatively small number of vicious right-wingers who advocated race hatred and the belief that everything wrong with Germany was someone else's fault.  As this group grew in influence, even ordinary Germans came to believe that their defeat in WWI was the result of "Jewry," and that other races - particularly, in their view, the Jews and Slavs, were less than human.  Against them, the Nazis told the Germans, brutality wa acceptable.  As the Nazi Party gained more influence, they also advocated more and more brutality against these groups and engendered the belief in Germans that brutality was not only acceptable, but necessary.  The result speaks for itself.

Thus, Nazis defined the Germany of WWI in part by engendering a culture of acceptance of brutality.  It's a sad and frightening thing to see spittle-flecked right-wing bobbleheads pushing us all down the same road.

•  Fascists Are Everywhere, Always

  It's too bad we cannot consider the crimes of Nazi-era Germany as other than a UNIQUE madness derived from the minds of a handful of MONSTERS, whipping a susceptible people into a frenzy of patriotic hate. Because the madness was not unique, nor were the monsters just an unlucky product of that time.

  The susceptibilty of the people to being whipped into patriotic hate appears to be as much a possibility in America as in Germany. In fact, it appears to be a universal property of nations that think they are "the sole superpower". Absolutely corrupting power.

  We used to have checks and balances in this country, so I thought we could defray the impulse politically, if not culturally.

  But now the media is a propaganda organ of the neofascists, just as in Nazi Germany, Maoist China, or Stalinist USSR. War under false prentenses? Forget about it. Runaway Bride! Missing in Aruba! Jacko walks!

  Soon we'll be debating who among us wants to go soft on flag burners. These defenders of the second amendment will be branded traitors, people who need to shut the hell up.

  The road to fascism is lined with debates like these.

  by easong on Thu Jun 16, 2005 at 09:19:06 AM PDT

•  Comments

     I agree with the overall point of the above diary, but I'd like to suggest that many Nazi doctrines (though, until a late period, not their particular instantiation in a Nazi guise) were standard right-wing fare in German politics, not just from 1918 on but even before 1918.  In World War I the Germans had learned to dream big dreams of European empire, and in the fantasies of the right wing of German politics, the collapse of 1918 had never happened.
      As it actually happened, it was the German generals -- and particularly Ludendorff -- who pulled the plug on the German war effort after the failure of the German offensive in the summer of '18.  This was based on a realistic military assessment of the situation: the Germans were starving at home, they could not win in the West, and their line was being pushed back (though slowly).  They made a political calculation that it was better for Germany to survive intact under any conditions, than to go on fighting.
      But these brave men hadn't the guts to go on record as having stopped the war.  That was against the Prussian ethic, however much it might be Realpolitik.  So they shoved off the responsibility on others.  A civilian deputation, not a military one, was sent off to negotiate the armistice of November 11.  Responsibility for food, security, and political control was left to the German center-left politicians, while the Wehrmacht absolved itself of blame for defeat, pointing the finger at the Socialists, the Jews, and others. The long-term goal was a political one: to return power in Germany to the hands of the extreme revanchist right.  The Nazis were one expression of that position: crude enough to wrinkle the noses of the aristocracy, but in the end, not unacceptable to them.  There's a straight line to be drawn between the militarists of Wilhelmine Germany, through the reactionary Freikorps vigilantes they created, through several different parties on the German right, to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.  And the basic goals of the Nazis -- destruction of democracy, rearmament of Germany, remilitarization of society, and ultimately the conquest of Europe -- belonged to the German right in general, and not to the Nazis alone.  The Nazi fixation on "Rasse" was perhaps more of a fringe belief, but it was acceptable to the rest of the right wing; they simply didn't care enough about Jews and "undesirables" to worry about it.  And certainly putting Communists and Socialists to death, or placing them in concentration camps, sounded good as well.
     Why bother to recount the connections of the Nazis with the rest of the German right?  Because throughout Weimar Germany, that right wing had the support of a very large portion of German society, and that support steadily increased through the later '20s and early '30s.  The relatively good Nazi showings of the early '30s simply reflect right-wing Germans deciding that, of the many rightist parties, the Nazis were the most likely to win and therefore should be backed.  It was never just a matter of a tiny number of extremists magically hypnotizing the crowds; it was the matter of one group of extremists among many unifying the extreme right and center-right in order to be able to take power and impose their agenda.  In other words: the Nazis took control because their platform was backed by a large and influential segment of German society, who had a pretty good idea of what they were getting.

  by WIds on Thu Jun 16, 2005 at 09:27:21 AM PDT

  •  Thanks

    Thanks for your thoughtful and thorough comment.  In view of it, the situation in the U.S. seems even more chilling to me.

    by TheOrchid on Thu Jun 16, 2005 at 09:59:04 AM PDT