“The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” Hannah Arendt
Shawn Hamilton’s recent piece at Huff Post, entitled “What Those Who Studied Nazis Can Teach Us about the Strange Reaction to Donald Trump,” is a must-read for anyone who has studied history and is fearing that it is repeating itself. Or for anyone who has had it up to here with our so-called “friends” saying we should give Trump a chance. www.huffingtonpost.com/…
As early as 1940, journalists, historians, and others were using the word Gleichschaltung to try to explain the German public reaction to the rise of Hitler. According to Hamilton, it “is often translated from the German as ‘coordination’ and refers to the process of — politically speaking — getting in line” and giving the person in question a chance. To continue quoting Arendt,
“The essence of being an intellectual is that one fabricates ideas about everything,” and [many of the intellectuals of her time were] “trapped by their own ideas.”
Hamilton goes on to explain that the intellectuals “conceded premises to faulty arguments.” The faulty premise that Hitler used was called Dolchstoss, or “a stab in the back.” In this case, among other things, it was the lie being peddled by Hitler that Germany was winning World War I before the politicians just gave up and surrendered. Many Germans who rejected Hitler’s racism were positively impressed with his desire to undo the humiliation they suffered when they were “stabbed in the back” at the end of the Great War. He used this same type of lie to blame the hardships faced by Germans on Jews and others who were “stabbing them in the back,” e.g. many Germans really didn’t believe that Poland posed any threat to them but bought into the impression that Poles were an inferior people who couldn’t be trusted.
They “rejected the uglier aspects of Nazism but gave ground in ways that ultimately made it successful.” They knew that the “facts” of the propaganda were wrong, but essentially bought into the authoritarian regime that Hitler established because they were impressed by the broader paradigm established by his propaganda machine.
As a first example of how this is playing itself out today, Hamilton cites Chris Matthews, a man often trapped by his own ideas. On the night of the election, he essentially blamed Clinton for her defeat because she hadn’t been tough on illegal immigration, bad trade deals, and “stupid wars.” He essentially praised Trump for running a “legitimate” campaign on these issues, i.e. we should give him a chance now.
Matthews is just one of several journalists cited by Hamilton who bought into — got in line with — the propaganda campaign that Trump was selling because they were trapped by one main idea: liberal policies and political correctness were “stabbing people in the back.” As Hamilton writes, “the suggestion that illegal immigration is the cause of the economic struggles of working-class whites is an American Dolchstoss.” It is a lie — other things like mechanization are the problem — but it plays into people’s sense that they’ve been “stabbed in the back,” so it resonates with them.
Of course, real journalists — some of them so-called friends — would examine the real causes of economic hardship. Instead, they would rather “get in line” with Trump’s propaganda — give him a chance — and regurgitate his blaming liberal policies for the “problems” being caused by illegal immigration.
Hamilton then goes on to cite a 1949 research study conducted by Harvard psychologists Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman entitled,” On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm.” The purpose of their research was to examine the incongruity between what people expect to perceive and what they actually perceive. In a nutshell, the subjects saw what they expected to see, not what they actually saw, because what they actually saw made no sense to them. To apply that to our current situation, we can’t possibly have elected an authoritarian dictator as President because...well, because the United States would never do that.
I can in no way do this article full justice and have just scratched the surface of it. And Hamilton cites a number of writers whose books I now want to read. So go read it.
Two 1930’s words for our time: Gleichshaltung and Dolchstoss. Yes, history does repeat itself.