As a scholar of German-Jewish history, I’m reluctant to make overstated analogies with the past. But if I had to suggest a parallel with what is happening in Trump’s America, I would start in Munich in 1923. The Nazi party, founded three years earlier out of the political disillusionment of Germany’s loss in World War I, started to gain a foothold. It was one of many right-wing, nationalist parties vying for power in the nascent democracy called the Weimar Republic. Allied against liberal democratic principles, the Nazi party began to grow and find a diverse base of support among artisans, merchants, civil servants, shop owners, war veterans, and students. Members of the elite were also attracted by its nativist rhetoric and virulent antisemitism, including publishers, manufacturers, business owners, and aristocrats. Fueled by ethno-nationalism, rabid scapegoating, and promises of greatness and messianic rebirth, the Nazi party even had, as some historians have argued, an integrative function in German society during these early years by the sheer fact that it was more of a popular movement than a class-based one.
Composed almost entirely of men in their 20s and 30s who felt politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised, the party’s methods relied heavily on hate rallies, thuggery, raucous speeches, racist newsletters, and anti-democracy manifestos. Led from the very beginning by Hitler as their salvific figure, the Nazis marched throughout Germany; they gathered in beer halls and in streets, donning uniforms, sporting insignias of hate, and marshalling military force. It would take another five or so years for its message of hate, Aryan supremacy, and nationalist regeneration to take hold in Germany as a truly popular political revolution. And it would be another five years after that until Hitler would be sworn in as Chancellor of Germany.
I do not think Trump is Hitler, and we are not (quite) in 1933. Our democratic institutions are much more stable, and although we are not in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, it can certainly be argued that we are still in the shadows of the 2008 Great Recession. In the past week, it has become abundantly clear (as if more evidence was needed) that our President is an enabler of extremely dangerous rhetoric, ideas, and actions. He has countenanced the shameless, meteoric rise – or better put, return – of American Nazis, who have reignited long-existing racist structures and catalyzed anti-immigrant and anti-black movements in the US. At the same time, Trump’s policies and actions have laid the groundwork for eroding our constitutional, democratic system of checks and balances with his attacks on the judiciary, the free press, the independent media, and anyone publicly opposing him. The American Hitler – if there will be one – hasn’t yet arrived, or maybe we can’t recognize him yet. Perhaps the closest thing we can say is that Trump’s authoritarian behaviors, coupled with the terrorism of white supremacy, may be the pre-conditions for the rise of a Hitler-like figure on American soil.
Trump’s inexplicable reticence to come out immediately in condemnation of the white supremacists in Charlottesville was appalling, and it was only outdone by his unconscionable press conference condemning “both sides,” as if there are moral equivalencies between the violence of white supremacy and our country’s fundamental democratic values. Why is this so deeply disturbing?
First of all, the rally was a carefully orchestrated assault – mounted as a visual and auditory spectacle – that aimed to normalize white supremacy. It sought to engender fear in non-whites while galvanizing support among Trump’s Middle America for a form of Nazism that was palatable and perhaps even inspiring in its brazenness. The chorus of angry, white supremacists sought to rebrand and unify a new generation of racists (the so-called “Alt-Right”) by simultaneously drawing upon the long, American history of white supremacy and endowing it with a new legitimacy, urgency, and fashionability.
While the rally made use of stock Nazi intimidation techniques (torches, guns, flags, Hitler salutes, and military militia) as well as racist rhetoric and nationalist slogans (“Blood and Soil”), it applied Nazi principles to propagate a new slogan of purity: “YOU [shouted as an accusatory ‘you!’] will not replace us!” To be sure, the Nazis might have said this, and they certainly would have felt the same way: You – the Jews, the Communists, the Liberals, the immigrants, the homosexuals – will not replace us (the “true Germans” rooted in the “soil” of German land and endowed with a special right of existence above all others by virtue of the purity of their “blood”). At times, the slogan actually became: “Jews will not replace us!” Just as in the Nazi worldview, the violence comes from the decisive and complete separation between “us” and “you,” namely anyone deemed non-white, non-European, non-Aryan, or non-Christian.
This slogan plays directly on the fears of garden-variety Trump supporters from white Middle America: They fear affirmative action replacing white students; they fear immigrants taking their jobs; they fear diversity education replacing European education; they fear globalization replacing ethno-nationality; they fear feminism replacing patriarchy; they fear Islam replacing Christianity; they fear Black Lives Matters replacing the value of white lives; they fear Jews controlling capital and the media; they fear gay marriage replacing heteronormative families. “You will not replace us” is a slogan that makes certain parts of Nazism palatable to Trump’s Middle America because it mirrors a broader set of anxieties.
The rally was also an assault on higher education, particularly the value of the open, public university and the ideals of diversity, community, free inquiry, and difference, which Richard Spencer has explicitly linked with corruption and ideology in his “Manifesto” for the Alt-Right movement. The rally was staged as a pathway through the University of Virginia, one the nation’s most renowned public universities: the marchers went past the bookstore and the library, across the academic lawn, climbed the stairs to the Rotunda, and descended to the Jefferson memorial. The visual spectacle of the torches coupled with the unrelenting, masculinist chants of “YOU will not replace us!” on the grounds of the university were meant to send a singular message of hate to faculty and students alike: “You” do not belong here; “you” are not welcome here; “you” are the source of indoctrination. We are re-staking our claim to the land, to the university, to the city, to the nation, and to the truth. As Spencer writes at the end of his manifesto: “Higher education … is only appropriate for a cognitive elite dedicated to truth.” Storming the university is a first step in reinforcing its “truth” of white supremacy.
Finally, the chanters were almost all men – many in their 20s and 30s – and their strident, masculinist voices provided the soundtrack for the march. They appeared to be able-bodied, well-groomed, clean-shaven, often with hair coiffed, donning khakis and collared shirts. Drawing energy from the long history of white terrorism through the presence of the KKK and other hate groups, they proffered an openly sanitized image of the “Alt-Right” as ethnically and professionally American, mere descendants of the European-Aryan race, as purely American as apple pie. They sought to create an image of everyday Nazis, the-boy-next-door Nazi, who embodies Middle America’s anxieties, fears, and hopes. Our American Nazis consider themselves to be both victims and redeemers, the future embodiment of the “true America” sought by Trump and all-too-many of his supporters.
Let me return to Munich in 1923. After nearly a year of thuggish hate rallies, manifestos, and virulently anti-Semitic speeches and newsletters, the year ended with a failed coup by Hitler and members of the Nazi party in Munich. While in jail, Hitler came to the realization that Nazism would not come to power by a forceful revolution, but would need to be brought about legally, with a more coherent political infrastructure and cultural imaginary. The Nazi party would eventually be elected by popular vote, by millions of people who stood behind its message of hate. It was hardly inevitable or preordained. Meanwhile, the far-left, left, and center parties had largely written off Hitler as a fringe lunatic, a laughingstock who would never be taken seriously. They adopted a “wait-and-see attitude,” while fighting amongst themselves rather than acting in solidarity against Hitler. The other nationalist parties on the right and far-right acquiesced, compromised, and collaborated with the Nazis out of self-interest, enabling Hitler to come to power through a hastily concocted, coalition government.
Of course, the future is never a foregone conclusion. It remains open as long as we act to resist the normalization of white supremacy and stave off the scourge of Nazism. I send my gratitude to the thousands of brave men and women who resisted the Nazis in Charlottesville, who drowned out their messages of hate with messages of love, who risked their bodies and livelihoods in the name of our democracy. Resistance to hate is never futile. The essential difference between Munich in 1923 and Charlottesville in 2017 is that we resisted – forcefully and vocally – in solidarity. And we will resist again and again.
Todd Samuel Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
Munich 1923 / Charlottesville 2017 : http://ift.tt/2w6Jwy0
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