The Longest Days
Last night I stumbled on a Netflix series about the people around Adolf Hitler and how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party grew to prominence and control in Germany. The bottom line is that it was a slow and steady process that took fifteen years to take serious root and then lasted for twelve years. It started in 1918 as a direct result of the ignominious defeat of Germany in WWI and the stinging refusal by many of the far right to accept the Versailles Treaty terms that not only imposed responsibility for the war on Germany, but also imposed significant reparations on Germany. To the victor go the spoils of war to be sure, but the historic concept of a “Cartheginian Peace” which attempts to inflict great and ongoing pain on the vanquished is less acceptable in a connected global world. The Germans after WWI were less contrite than they were sore about the outcome and that took shape in the Nazi movement that grew steadily through the 1920’s. In the elections of 1924 and again in 1928, the building global prosperity shining on Germany as well as the rest of the world, caused the movement and its charismatic Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, to shrink from prominence. But just as the bad “Punic” feelings gradually faded, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing global depression caused a groundswell of support for anything that would lift the German economy. I imagine people of Germany thinking that the “bigger picture” of economic survival justified all the otherwise distasteful views and biases of a small group of angry men that surrounded Hitler. Survival instinct is a nasty and powerful driver that overwhelms the “luxury” of moral fabric.
The scary picture portrayed in this documentary was of how the turn of world events broke down the natural ethical hesitancy of the majority of Germans and put them at the mercy of a group of angry men and women who saw the opportunity to spread their evil across a broad array of otherwise normal work-a-day views. That can say to us that we are all just one meal away from despicable acts. But I think what it really says is that we must be ever-vigilant of the evil elements of society because they are like a dormant seed that lays in wait for just the right environment to germinate. There is more harm to the lunatic fringe than meets the eye. I saw the difference between the manipulative zeal of Rudolf Hess and the warped anti-social anger of Heinrich Himmler. What I couldn’t help but see were the similarities with the characters on the national stage of Trump’s world. Hess seems very like Steve Bannon while Steven Miller even looks like Himmler and the similarities of his unhappy and outcast youth manifest themselves in such similar hatred and lust for vengeance that it sends shivers up your spine.
I spend a great deal of time trying as best I can to understand what motivates people in certain directions and I must declare an obsession with trying to comprehend the origins of the hatred and divisiveness that drive the Trumpian and general Republican thinking. It is very clear that Republicans in large numbers are drawn to Trump like the post-1929 German electorate was drawn to Hitler. It seems the extreme version of economic survivalism that invokes that “bigger picture” rather than core beliefs. It unmasks (good word in this day and age) the feebleness of character that causes people to do what the Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio people among us have done and overturned their initial and purest instincts in favor of joining the pack of dogs enjoying their momentary dominance. But it is the Trumpians at the center of the movement that are so concerning because they have either the unbounded ambition to seize the moment for their own benefit (think Hermann Goering) or, far worse, for their ideological commitment for hatred as with Joseph Goebbels. The truth is that all of these evil examples of human beings are just as bad as the other. It is impossible to distinguish the despicability of greed and ideology, or even the harm of supporting the “bigger picture”. The failure to recognize or stand against the worst of human actions are all equally corrupt and unforgivable. We are taught in many religions that forgiveness is divine, but there is a line that even divinity cannot justifiably cross. We are at that line now.
We are entering the last two months of the 2020 election cycle and now that the party conventions have all ended, everyone is reading the tea leaves for signs about the final trends. There is a natural desire to suggest that the conventions caused a meaningful alteration of the sentiments and thus can be determinative of an electoral bias. I think of a boxing match in its last round. Much has gone before and the contestants are bloodied and battered, but we all know that anyone can win in the last round regardless of the points theretofore scored in the match. It is a scary moment as the combatants throw roundhouse punches in hopes of a final round knockout or at least knockdown. Few spectators who support one combatant over the other will change their views at this late stage and the undecided are a large group that will await the final bell to mark their scorecards. The truth is that the contest will only be known once the tally is read. The polling is helpful, but the behavioral phenomenon, as reported today in the New York Times, known as “availability”, is worrisome. “Availability” is a heuristic (a means for a person to make a determination) where people make judgments about the likelihood of an event based on what they know is possible, usually based on the experiences they have witnessed. We were all shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election, so we can all imagine that sort of shocking outcome. In fact, it is far less shocking to us because we have seen it before. That means we can see it in our minds eye happening again despite the dramatically different environment we now see or feel. For many of us, that is a spine-shuddering thought.
I could not avert my eyes from the documentary of Hitler’s acolytes. As much as I like the expression that no one wants to be the guy caught holding Mussolini’s coat, I keep waiting for the acolytes to scatter. There are enough signs of this to give us some hope with the best one being Kellyanne Conway’s excuse that she is moving on from the White House for personal family reasons. We should all see this as a rat on a piece of flotsam on which to escape the ship. Watching for those defections is perhaps the best indicator of the end. But then again, most of Hitler’s crew either killed themselves or let the Allies kill them. The tales of Eichmann and Mengele escaping to South America are greatly outnumbered by the tales of the rats that were caught jumping into the water when the Nazi ship went down, but they all signal the same phenomenon that results from failure and realization of people’s participation in evil intent. They may not all think they, themselves, were evil, but they all seem to recognize that the rest of the world would disagree. These are the longest days and we can only hope that the world’s view of evil stays focused and does not get diluted for lack of the latest meal.