I read this and thought about Donald Trump and the U.S.
Why They Followed Adolf Hitler. The root cause: The Germans' fear of modernism. By Rafael Seligmann
http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=257
Why did the Germans elect Adolf Hitler, thereby unconditionally linking their fate to his person? Why did they go to war for him? Why did some even become murderers? Rafael Seligmann's book, "Hitler. Die Deutschen und ihr Führer (Hitler. The Germans and Their Führer)," shows that Hitler could only win power, because he had made himself the spokesman of German fears and longings. He led a war against modernism.
Adolf Hitler is the dominant figure of our age. He outshines Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Mao Tse-tung and Saddam Hussein as a politician, strategist and villain. The ramifications of Hitler's doings were so far-reaching that they continue to affect the emotions, thoughts and activities of humankind, and especially of the Germans.
Hitler's life and deeds have been more thoroughly investigated than those of anyone else in recent history. Respected historians and journalists have dedicated lifetimes to examining his world view and his politics and the atrocities and wars they led to. In their zeal, some biographers have included Hitler's private life in their investigation. Even his dogs have been written about.
Given the numerous publications about Hitler, they have generated little insight. Some of the most crucial questions about Hitler have only been addressed tangentially and still need to be answered adequately.
How did this Austrian immigrant manage to captivate the Germans? Why did 17 million people vote for him in free democratic elections? What moved the German people to choose him as their leader? Why did the Germans fight and kill in the name of Hitler, Nazism and their country; even sacrificing themselves in the end, long after it was indisputably clear that their leader was going down and would take the country with him over the cusp of the abyss? And how could it reach the point where the Germans committed collective genocide against the Jews?
Those questions alone prove that Hitler's power could only have blossomed in collaboration with the German people. On his own, the mediocre postcard illustrator and would-be artist would have remained forever a nobody.
And that is the crucial difference between Hitler and the other dictators mentioned above. Those leaders dispensed entirely with any kind of democratic legitimization. Popularity was secondary for those men. Hitler, by contrast, enjoyed the broad support, confidence, admiration - indeed the love - of the Germans until the very end of his days.
Hitler's power was based on the unconditional allegiance of the population. The Germans put their trust in Hitler. And that is how he was able to make his worldview, his politics, his hate, his war, and his crimes those of an entire nation.
Niccolò Machiavelli said that love or fear were the most effective tools in securing power. But "perhaps it is best," the Florentine political theorist said, "to wish to be both loved and feared." It was that amalgamate of feelings that bound the Germans to Hitler. But why? What did this man from the small Austrian town Braunau convey so effectively to his people?
Hitler's appeal has always been, and continues to be, attributed to his charisma. Hitler himself used the term providence, as if there was a mythical bond between the Führer and his people. But there was nothing heavenly about the Germans' entanglement with Hitler. As in every lasting relationship, it began with a spontaneous connection, which emerged from shared cultural and mythological legacy. But there were also tangible elements. His charisma was a pretext, masking the joint interests of the Germans and Hitler. What connected the Führer and his people was fear of the modern age, or in other words, the future.
Modernism meant the endeavor to subject all thought and action to reason, thereby making decisions and actions comprehensible and verifiable. This is an attitude that requires the rejection of any metaphysical rationalization.
Modern thought was never able to develop as fully in Germany as it did elsewhere in Europe. The baby of the Enlightenment, epitomized by Kant, Lessing and many others, was thrown out with the bathwater of the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation. The vast majority of the German bourgeoisie was more interested in aligning itself with the nationalist idealism of German philosophers Fichte and Arndt, or Richard Wagner's newly invented world of Germanic myths. Indeed, they veritably fled to those comforts, instead of subjecting their political, social and cultural awareness to objectively verifiable criteria.
That attitude gained currency following the trauma of defeat in World War I and the socio-economic crisis it brought in its wake. Instead of rationally tackling and overcoming the difficulties that loomed at the beginning of the 1920s, the Germans sought escape in an intoxication of chauvinism - the same jingoism that had already contributed so much to their misery during World War I and thereafter.
The Germans felt, and indeed were, threatened by modernism, since they had, to a great degree, closed their eyes to the principles of lucid reason. Hitler also considered himself a victim of modernism and blamed it for his early failures to that point. Hitler and his National Socialist movement gave true voice to the fears of the German middle class. He told the Germans that the Jews were the one and only cause of all their misery. And the Jews were, in fact, the undisputed beneficiaries of modernism, whether as democrats, capitalists, intellectuals or communists.
But Hitler was not satisfied just to denounce the Jews. His goal was to lead his people into a war of liberation from the Jews, activating the anti-Semitism dormant in Germany. Indeed, more than any other group, the Jews embodied and cultivated modernism. Although it's rarely discussed these days, back then there were significant economic, social and intellectual differences between the German Gentile and the Jewish communities. The Nazis fueled those conflicts until they escalated into a majority war against the minority, which found its ultimate expression in coldly executed mass murder. The Germans were not murderous anti-Semites contrary to the claim of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. But they looked the other way, tolerated and even profited from the genocide.
Hitler waged war with modern tactics. The enthusiasm he and his cohorts showed for the newest techniques in propaganda, mass mobilization and weapons of war has long obscured the fact that the Nazis and their Führer availed themselves of those tools only as a means to an end, and that end was a campaign to exterminate modernism and its adherents. Hitler's ultimate goal never changed - a return to the earth, to "blood and soil", to the idealized world of the Teutons.
The "total war" the Nazis proclaimed in 1943 was the brainchild of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Millions of Germans participated enthusiastically, steadfast until the bitter end in their loyalty to Hitler. What resistance there was, made up largely of elite army officers, lacked all support among the masses. So Claus von Stauffenberg and his comrades-in-arms who made an attempt on Hitler's life, on July 20, 1944, were forced to dissimulate and pretend to defend the authority of the state.
Nazi propaganda claimed a supranatural unity between the Führer and the people: "Germany is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany." While the totality of that alliance may be exaggerated, there is no doubt that Hitler could not have done what he did except by joining forces with the Germans.
- Rafael Seligmann is an editor in chief at The Atlantic Times. After the publication of his book, "Hitler. Die Deutschen und ihr Führer (Hitler. The Germans and Their Führer)," the following statement met with fierce opposition: "The continued prohibition of Hitler's book 'Mein Kampf' in Germany is counterproductive. It is evidence of a lack of democratic self-confidence. Unrestricted access to Hitler's writings would not produce new Nazis. On the contrary, it would serve to dismantle a myth." The paperback edition of Seligmann's book will be published this month.
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