And for further reading, from Professor Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, and author of a May, 2020 book "How Fascism Works." To get started, here's the link to his Dec. 22, 2021 long article at The Guardian Newspaper: "America is now in fascism's legal phase"... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/america-fascism-legal-phase
A selection from the Guardian article: "The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy allliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization."
And here is historian Ian Kershaw's handling of Hitler's first speech to the entire German nation, by radio, on Feb. 1, 1933 after he had just dimissed the legislature, the Reichstag. And after he and his party had won an earlier election giving them the largest number of votes in that Reichstag. There was to be a new national election, essentially a plebiscite:
"Since 'the days of treachery' fourteen years earlier, 'the Almighty hs withdrawn his blessing from our people'...National collapse had opened the way for 'the Communist method of madness finally to poison and undermine the inwardly shaken and uprooted people.' Nothing had been spared the pernicious Communist influence, which had afflicted the family, all notions of honour and loyalty, people and Fatherland, culture and economy down to the basis of morality and belief. ...National unity, resting on the protections of Christianity 'as the basis of our entire morality' and the family 'as the germ of our body of nation and state,' would be restored. 'Spiritiual, political and cultural nihilism ' challenging this aim would be mercilessly attacked to prevent Germany sinking into Communist anarchism. .."
From page 440, The Chapter entitled "The Making of the Dictator.
And here's a head's up that I'm just getting started on, a link to the Heritage Foundation's initiative, a 920 page playbook, set of recommendations for a conservative administration in 2025, a grand transition plan, called the "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" Here's the link:
I read the initiative as a strong hint that a second Trump administration would not duplicate the errors and confusion of the ill prepared 1st term, and many hundreds of movement conservatives from all across that portion of the spectrum worked on the document.
For the American left and Center, which probed, picked and basically threw a fit over Bernie Sanders version of the Green New Deal and National health Insurance, which came in at an "overwhelming" 35 pages, I think the 920 pages from the Right help put things in perspective as where the power lies today.
In the calendar space between this Introductory posting and the writing that will soon follow, probably between Christmas and New Year's for Part III, on the threat of Trump to American democracy and the American involvement in Gaza-Palestinian-Israeli-Greater Middle East ongoing agony, and then Part IV on the situation in Ukraine and the continued international fumbling in combatting Climate Chaos, I thought I'd make a few recommendations for further reading.
First, the broader view of European and American Society by Philipp Blom: "Fracture: Life & Culture in the West, 1918-1938," (2015). It is an accurate portrayal, I believe, of the feelings and emotions experienced by a world seemingly out of control, if not yet "On Fire," driven by the pace of inventions and modernization, and its effect on the rural masses still left behind, with the looming analogy for our times of rural, religious Bavaria, "birthplace of National Socialism," pitted against the decadent, rootless leftist urban cultures of Berlin and Hamburg. Hollywood and the coastal elites vs the virtuous Trumpite base, anyone?
Second, Eric D. Weitz's "Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy," (2007, with a 2018 Preface by the author which includes this thought: "Weimar is ever-present but its meaning is not to be found in the crazy ideas one easily encounters on various websites. Weimar, instead, is the primary example of the fragility of democracy. " When one reads on beyond the sentence, it is very clear the author has in mind Trump and his administration two years after his surprise 2016 election win over Hillary Clinton.
Weitz's book I recommend ahead of the classic I read upon first graduating from Lafayette College in 1972, Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider." First published in 1968 and now available in a new addition, with a new cover, at major booksellers. For contemporary reasons, I recommend Weitz over Gay at this point in our tribulations because I think he does a better job of intergrating the whole Weimar complexity: politics, economics and culture and gives several ground level reader tours of the major street scenes in the Republic.
Third, and arguably it might have been first, is the first volume of Ian Kershaw's acclaimed two volume biography of Hitler, "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." (1998). It's very readable, and I'm doing a refresher course since I first read it in the spring of 2021. It forms a considerable part of my resources for daring to make a comparison between American society and politics in 2023, and the Weimar scene, 1919-1933. It's hardly a perfect match - no one should expect that - but I find more similarities than most academics, especially along the cultural-religious-urban-rural axis, than makes me comfortable, blacks at first in the eyes of conservative American Republicans, at least as far back as Goldwater and then Nixon, now competing with immigrant Hispanics, for the scapegoat role that Jews played in Germany, neck in neck in infamy on the right with the Bolshevicks/Communits they were often lumped with; and, as I will try to show in the forthcoming essay, with the lumping of genuine Communists with socialists and social democrats, the largest party in Germany, right up until the elections of 1933, being the the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. They were evolutionary socialists, working within the German system, but the German Right did not see it that way, and the SPD's infrastructure and its leaders, those who had not already been inturned in the first concentration camp at Dachau, in early 1933, would be eliminated in the cynical use of the May 1 celebration, turned into national round-up day on May 2. Those who were "merely" imprisoned were the lucky ones.
Trumps language and his lists spoken in his Veteran's Day speech this November, in New Hampshire, has to be understood in this light, there being concentration camps already planned to hold the illegal immigrants prior to deportation. Who else is the question that directly follows from his speech.
And for further reading, from Professor Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, and author of a May, 2020 book "How Fascism Works." To get started, here's the link to his Dec. 22, 2021 long article at The Guardian Newspaper: "America is now in fascism's legal phase"... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/america-fascism-legal-phase
A selection from the Guardian article: "The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy allliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization."
And here is historian Ian Kershaw's handling of Hitler's first speech to the entire German nation, by radio, on Feb. 1, 1933 after he had just dimissed the legislature, the Reichstag. And after he and his party had won an earlier election giving them the largest number of votes in that Reichstag. There was to be a new national election, essentially a plebiscite:
"Since 'the days of treachery' fourteen years earlier, 'the Almighty hs withdrawn his blessing from our people'...National collapse had opened the way for 'the Communist method of madness finally to poison and undermine the inwardly shaken and uprooted people.' Nothing had been spared the pernicious Communist influence, which had afflicted the family, all notions of honour and loyalty, people and Fatherland, culture and economy down to the basis of morality and belief. ...National unity, resting on the protections of Christianity 'as the basis of our entire morality' and the family 'as the germ of our body of nation and state,' would be restored. 'Spiritiual, political and cultural nihilism ' challenging this aim would be mercilessly attacked to prevent Germany sinking into Communist anarchism. .."
From page 440, The Chapter entitled "The Making of the Dictator.
And here's a head's up that I'm just getting started on, a link to the Heritage Foundation's initiative, a 920 page playbook, set of recommendations for a conservative administration in 2025, a grand transition plan, called the "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" Here's the link:
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
I read the initiative as a strong hint that a second Trump administration would not duplicate the errors and confusion of the ill prepared 1st term, and many hundreds of movement conservatives from all across that portion of the spectrum worked on the document.
For the American left and Center, which probed, picked and basically threw a fit over Bernie Sanders version of the Green New Deal and National health Insurance, which came in at an "overwhelming" 35 pages, I think the 920 pages from the Right help put things in perspective as where the power lies today.
In the calendar space between this Introductory posting and the writing that will soon follow, probably between Christmas and New Year's for Part III, on the threat of Trump to American democracy and the American involvement in Gaza-Palestinian-Israeli-Greater Middle East ongoing agony, and then Part IV on the situation in Ukraine and the continued international fumbling in combatting Climate Chaos, I thought I'd make a few recommendations for further reading.
First, the broader view of European and American Society by Philipp Blom: "Fracture: Life & Culture in the West, 1918-1938," (2015). It is an accurate portrayal, I believe, of the feelings and emotions experienced by a world seemingly out of control, if not yet "On Fire," driven by the pace of inventions and modernization, and its effect on the rural masses still left behind, with the looming analogy for our times of rural, religious Bavaria, "birthplace of National Socialism," pitted against the decadent, rootless leftist urban cultures of Berlin and Hamburg. Hollywood and the coastal elites vs the virtuous Trumpite base, anyone?
Second, Eric D. Weitz's "Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy," (2007, with a 2018 Preface by the author which includes this thought: "Weimar is ever-present but its meaning is not to be found in the crazy ideas one easily encounters on various websites. Weimar, instead, is the primary example of the fragility of democracy. " When one reads on beyond the sentence, it is very clear the author has in mind Trump and his administration two years after his surprise 2016 election win over Hillary Clinton.
Weitz's book I recommend ahead of the classic I read upon first graduating from Lafayette College in 1972, Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider." First published in 1968 and now available in a new addition, with a new cover, at major booksellers. For contemporary reasons, I recommend Weitz over Gay at this point in our tribulations because I think he does a better job of intergrating the whole Weimar complexity: politics, economics and culture and gives several ground level reader tours of the major street scenes in the Republic.
Third, and arguably it might have been first, is the first volume of Ian Kershaw's acclaimed two volume biography of Hitler, "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." (1998). It's very readable, and I'm doing a refresher course since I first read it in the spring of 2021. It forms a considerable part of my resources for daring to make a comparison between American society and politics in 2023, and the Weimar scene, 1919-1933. It's hardly a perfect match - no one should expect that - but I find more similarities than most academics, especially along the cultural-religious-urban-rural axis, than makes me comfortable, blacks at first in the eyes of conservative American Republicans, at least as far back as Goldwater and then Nixon, now competing with immigrant Hispanics, for the scapegoat role that Jews played in Germany, neck in neck in infamy on the right with the Bolshevicks/Communits they were often lumped with; and, as I will try to show in the forthcoming essay, with the lumping of genuine Communists with socialists and social democrats, the largest party in Germany, right up until the elections of 1933, being the the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. They were evolutionary socialists, working within the German system, but the German Right did not see it that way, and the SPD's infrastructure and its leaders, those who had not already been inturned in the first concentration camp at Dachau, in early 1933, would be eliminated in the cynical use of the May 1 celebration, turned into national round-up day on May 2. Those who were "merely" imprisoned were the lucky ones.
Trumps language and his lists spoken in his Veteran's Day speech this November, in New Hampshire, has to be understood in this light, there being concentration camps already planned to hold the illegal immigrants prior to deportation. Who else is the question that directly follows from his speech.