COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

Note: 

A reader who collects The Peripatetic Philosopher Missives suggests resubmitting this, "As you did Why Is Hate Such A Powerful Motivator?"  He mentions this in the context of the current contentious political climate of the presidential election in the midst of a pandemic.  "Some report," he offers, "think it could end in a bloodbath."  Although a bit melodramatic, this may provide some perspective as to how things can get out of hand.

JRF 

                                                  COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 18, 2019

When I was a boy in fourth grade at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Clinton, Iowa, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to give the class a ten minute capsule of the latest news on the Western Front of World War Two.  

My information was limited to The Clinton Herald, but I surmised when I was much older that it was a way of getting the class into the afternoon session, and to control me, a constant talker and class interrupter.  Should I continue this behavior, I was cautioned by Sister, I would lose my ten minute window of reporting.  Her strategy worked. 

By high school, I was reading books checked out at the library that might be related to World War Two.  Ones such book was Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935). 

The book was a novel and a shocker on dictatorship and totalitarian rule in which people had no rights.  That thought sent shutters through me, the idea staying with me the rest of my life.  Such books did not interest my athletic friends, and there was no longer Sister Mary Helen to project my anxiety or question the relevance.  Books of some depth became furniture of my mind.

[I’ve always had a rather eclectic mind as well as an introverted personality, meaning I would read things stimulating to me while finding no one within my circle with whom to discuss them.  I’ve often thought Goethe was such a person with whom I could relate, but I don’t speak German and he died 100 years before I was born.]   

HITLER’S THIRTY DAYS TO POWER

Recently, I read the distinguished Yale professor Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.’s (1932 – 2008) book, “Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933” (2003).  It reminded me of this earlier book mentioned above, as well as a recent e-mail I received from a reader, who writes:

This is a question with some malice aforethought: Have you ever read the US Constitution?  If yes, what responsibilities do you take from that understanding?

This is obviously a serious question, and although I once read the US Constitution, and have a copy nearby, I am not as familiar with it as I should be.  As this reader implies, there is no excuse.  Liberty is a very fragile right and wrought with danger.

Author Turner writes in “Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power":

On February 1 (1933) the parliament was dissolved.  On February 4, President von Hindenburg allowed the new chancellor (Hitler) to use presidential emergency powers to decree a law restricting freedom of press and assembly.

In March, a mysterious fire gutted the Reichstag building that enabled Hitler to take a giant step in the direction of absolute power.  Indeed, well before the Nazi leader assumed the powers of the presidency upon the death of Hindenburg in August 1934, Hitler was already the dictator of Germany. 

The weakness and fragmentation of German liberalism, the strength of militarism, and the susceptibility of part of the public to pseudo-scientific theories of race all played in what was to come.

DETERMINACY

Versions of Hitler’s rise to power have an unfortunate tendency to become deterministic.  This gives the impression that what happened was the inexorable product of great impersonal forces, that it was bound to happen, that there was no alternative.

Yet although such factors may have been necessary to the outcome, they were not sufficient.  They can help understand how the Third Reich became a possibility, but they cannot explain how it became a reality . . .

CONTINGENCY

An examination of events in January 1933 reveals the strong elements of contingency in the chain of events that brought Hitler to power.  The Third Reich is unquestionably a product of German history . . . the future dictator was rescued from failure by a series of unpredictable developments over which he had no control . . . actions of other people, for although impersonal forces may make events possible, people make events happen . . .

Germany during January 1933, was one of those frequent junctures in human affairs when the fates of many rested with a few . . . Compared with the role of these few men, Hitler’s role was reactive . . .

At a moment when the disposition of power in a great nation rested with this small group of individuals. Some of the most elementary of human sentiments – personal affinities and aversions, injured feelings, soured friendships, and desire for revenge – had profound political effect . . .

Luck – the most conspicuous of contingencies – was clearly on Hitler’s side . . . Hitler’s greatest stroke of luck lay in the personality quirks and other limitations of Kurt von Schleicher, the man who occupied the office he sought as January 1933 opened . . . He (Schleicher) compounded that liability by irreparably alienating an old friend . . .  the shallow devious Franz von Papen master of intrigue . . . He disastrously underrated Papen’s skill at that craft . . .

Schleicher reached, so to speak, his level of incompetence . . . Had Schleicher been more politically adept, Hitler need never have had a chance at the chancellorship . . . Had events taken a different turn in January 1933, Adolf Hitler would merit, at most, passing mention in histories of the 20^th century instead of bulking large as one of its principal movers and shakers . . .   

The Weimar Republic would have been authoritarian, but not totalitarian; nationalistic, not racist; distasteful, not demonic . . . It might have suspended or curtailed political and civil rights, but it would not have abolished those rights altogether . . . It would not have made anti-Semitism a matter of government policy or embarked on a systematic program of genocide . . .

The Second World War with the horrors it brought – including the atomic bomb, which was produced out of fear that Hitler might be the first to obtain it – was no more inevitable than his rise to power . . . Without Hitler’s Third Reich and the war he unleashed on the world, many aspects of human affairs since January 1933 would have been quite different . . .

Humanity would be more innocence and optimistic than has been possible since “Hiroshima” . . . Only under the Cold War was the United States later drawn into the wars in Korea and Vietnam that involved no vital American interests . . .

Hitler’s regime would reveal that centuries of civilization had not diminished the capacity of Homo sapiens for profound evil and that modern technology and bureaucratic structures make possible unspeakable crimes of hitherto unimagined magnitude . . .

RESPONSIBILITY

If however determinism is rejected, the question of responsibility must be addressed . . . One level of responsibility – that of omission rather than commission – must be assigned to the defenders of the Weimar Republic. 

Without intending to do so, they helped to pave the way for Hitler’s triumph.  It was the unwillingness of republican politicians to place preservation of parliamentary rule above partisan interests that led the Reichstag to abdicate control over the government in 1930 . . .

A much larger measure of responsibility must be assigned to the millions of Germans who freely gave their votes to Hitler and his party . . .

In Mein Kampf and other Nazi utterances, the Nazis abundantly demonstrated their scorn for law and their readiness to employ force to crush those who dared to oppose them . . . Yet there is no evidence that Hindenburg, Schleicher or Papen ever read Hitler’s book Mein Kampf . . .

Nor did they request analyses of Nazism by competent experts in the high civil service … The resulting inquiries revealed a violent movement bent not only on imposing dictatorial rule on Germany but also on abolishing the rule of law and subjecting Jewish citizens to persecution …

Inept Schleicher bears the heavy historical burden of having lifted from well-deserved obscurity to political prominence the man who became his nemesis and Hitler’s savior, Franz von Papen . . .  In the case of Papen, guilt – responsible for a grave offense – applies. 

He was the key figure in steering a course of events toward the disastrous outcome, the person who more than anyone else caused what happened.  None of what occurred in January 1933 would have been possible in the absence of his quest for revenge against Schleicher and his hunger for a return to power . . .

Had Hindenburg held to his initial, intuitive mistrust of Hitler, Germany and much of the rest of the world would have been spared much misery and destruction.  

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE …

What is it they say, “The past is prologue to the future”? 

Germany is in the eye of the storm here.  Yet, for the first three decades of the 20^th century, Germany held the premier position for science in the world.  German scientists were the most accomplished and honored in their fields, winning the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes. 

But in 1933 came Hitler.  German scientists who were Jewish were dismissed from their positions in laboratories and universities with the Nazi ideology coming to dominate Germany’s science communities.  Some German scientists enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis, most acquiesced arguing that science was outside politics and morality.  By the end of the Second World War few scientists much less educators and philosophers remained untainted by a regime bent on genocide and conquest. 

Scientists are no different from other human beings caught in complex moral dilemmas.  While scientists claim their research and analyses are value free, and that science is culturally and morally neutral, they have created weapons and technology that can destroy human civilization. 

A clear example of this is German scientist Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) of V-1 and V-2 rocket fame.  He was involved in the building of missiles that bombarded London during World War Two, only for this scientist, who used slave labor during the war, to survive Germany's defeat and have a second career in the United States. He became one of the darlings of the Space and Manhattan Project; the latter scientists being the creators of the first atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan in August 1945.  

After the war, when the United States was courting him, von Braun remarked that he didn’t care if he worked for Uncle Joe or Uncle Sam “all I really wanted was an uncle who was rich.” 

Could this irresponsible and calloused profile of scientific leadership also exist in other realms of society such as politics and government, business and industry, academics and the intellectual communities? 

If so, concomitant disaster is just around the corner.  How we think is how we behave.  Alas, it could happen here or in any other constitutionally conceived democratic nation.  It is something to think about.   

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