"Berlin Street Scene" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
On August 10th The Guardian published an article about a new history book.
The book: Prisoners of Time, by Christopher Clark
The review is written by Andrew Anthony.
some reader comments:
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What is more interesting is why civil organs such as judges were appropriated into suspending the Rule of Law and hence to look the "other way".
One of the most fatal errors of the Weimar Republic was not carrying out, from its very earliest years, a gradual but comprehensive clean-out of the German judiciary and civil service which it had inherited from the Kaiser.
For the sake of continuity and not rocking the boat the great majority of judges in 1930 had also been in place before 1918, and exercised their authority with quite scandalous partiality, far-Right terrorists routinely being acquitted or given derisory sentences for crimes which would lead their far-Left equivalents to the guillotine or life imprisonment.
This culture of one-sided impunity was instrumental in bringing about the Republic's collapse in 1931-32; so it's profoundly alarming to see something very similar now in place in the United States, where it seems to be a given that if you're an ex-President or one of his senior associates, then gross abuse of public office and attempted armed overthrow of the state are entirely understandable and no cause whatever for further action.
This is very dangerous territory to be getting into, and future generations may come to view January's attack on the Capitol as Trump's Beer-Hall Putsch, an apparently-farcical episode which in fact provided many useful lessons on how to do it better next time.
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To some extent a 'just get on with it tendency' helps would-be dictators cement their grip on states. There was a time when the nazis were not universally applauded in Germany. To some, they represented the future for a Germany badly affected by the First World War.
To others they represented a bulwark against soviet communist expansionism.
But to some others, those either disinterested or who felt themselves powerless, it was just another development to be accommodated, and from which to 'make the best of a bad hand'. Those who would attend rallies, etc, so that they wouldn't stand out from their neighbours, until everything became normalised and habitual.
To a degree some see that tendency in Johnson's UK where moves to reduce the opportunity to challenge the state are underway. It's not nazism, but it could possibly be the start of a slippery slope.
A sobering thought: when concentration camps were evacuated as the war in Europe drew to a close, civilian populations feared that the camp inmates would escape and murder everyone because they were anti social elements who had been locked away for the public good.
Many saw the deprivations as being what the inmates deserved.
Such was the power of the propaganda and the implicit trust in the state to know how best to protect the people. It took some time for ordinary Germans to realise how they had been deceived.
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Fascism is essentially one long hard-luck story; of how naturally superior people were somehow brought low by their inferiors, through weight of numbers and/or treachery within their own ranks, but must now straighten their backs and get even with the dirty rotters by whatever means are necessary.
The best definition that I've ever come across of this diffuse and often-puzzling phenomenon is "The revolt of the losers". Self-pity is intrinsic to it.
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It's also why some countries seemed in the 20th century - indeed in some cases still seem - to have a natural inclination towards fascism whereas others don't.
On the one hand you have the reduced-circumstances one like Hungary or Poland or Spain which were once a great deal bigger and more important but fell upon hard times; while there were also the frustrated-expectations ones like Germany, Italy and Japan which aspired to greatness but believed that they were being held back by various malign conspiracies against them.
But others appeared pretty well immune to it. Ireland was the only Catholic country in Europe not to have gone Fascist by 1940, which was of course partly because its disgruntled national minority had been segregated off into a statelet of its own, but also because of the sheer implausibility of the lost-greatness narrative.
Eoin O'Duffy and his Blueshirts yelling 'Make Ireland great again!" were figures of fun precisely because everyone knew that it never had been great, and moreover that if the Ireland of 1935 wasn't too brilliant the Ireland of 1835 had been a great deal worse.
Anyway, the United States and Britain now seem irrevocably to have joined the lost-greatness countries: so expect some interesting times ahead as they flail around trying to recreate a past that never was.
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The storming of the US Capitol in January is a clear sign that the threat of aggressive right-wing populism is not yet over in America....
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