The events of the last few weeks reminded me of this succinct summary of Timothy Ryback’s book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power fron Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:
Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
Historian Timothy Ryback, the author of Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power who also wrote the popular article How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, has a new piece in The Atlantic about Adolf Hitler’s relationship with the rich German industrialists who helped him rise to power, many of whom subsequently “ended up in concentration camps”.
The parallels to the present political situation in the US start right in the first paragraph:
He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”
And from later in the piece, he describes how German businessmen participated in enslavement and murder:
For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)
These companies did this in service of the bottom line, in keeping with Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder value. Friedman’s idea that the primary social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, along with the Corleone doctrine of “it’s just business”, still holds sway in boardrooms & C-suites across America, nowhere more so than in Silicon Valley. We’ll see how it works out for them.
This is quite a paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review (titled The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (subhead: “The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.”)) of Timothy Ryback’s new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power:
Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
I got this via Clayton Cubitt, who says “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Stay Connected