Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 1: 1789-1933, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The question of whether the peculiarities of German history justify speaking of a 'unique German path'--or perhaps of several 'unique German paths'--is the starting point of this two-volume study. . . . I present here not a 'total history', but a 'problem history'. At the centre of this history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stands the relationship between democracy and nation. On the one hand, I enquire how it happened that Germany was politically so far behind England and France, developing a nation state only after 1866 and a democracy later still, in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War and the revolution of 1918-19. On the other hand, I investigate the consequences of this twofold historical belatedness, consequences which are still with us today." Id. at 1. "Only the United States of America could lay claim to a small chronological edge when it came to determining the birthright to the new ideology of human community. By no means, however, did the North American subjects of the British break with their traditional religious understanding of the just order when they rebelled against the crown. On the contrary, their revolt and declaration of independence were informed and sustained by religious ideals. The American Revolution was a conservative revolution, something that cannot in any way be said of he events in France. American nationalism, in contrast to the French, was both modern and traditional." Id. at 42. "If the collapse of the first German Republic can be traced back to a single root cause, it lies in the long historical deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century--or, to put it another way, in the non-simultaneity of Germany's political modernization: the early democratization of suffrage and the later democratization of the system of government. Hitler was, after 1930, the main beneficiary of this contradiction and built the foundation of his success on it." "In his plan to destroy Weimar democracy, Hitler availed himself of all the possibilities the Weimar constitution had to offer. The tactics of legality he imposed on his party were far more successful than the revolutionary violence he had professed ten years earlier. . . . At the same time, Hitler could himself threaten the rulers of the country with revolutionary violence and civil war if they broke the law or changed it to the detriment of the National Socialists, as in the case of the emergency measure against political terror of 9 August 1932." "Hitler's conditional promise of legality, which contained an implicit threat, fulfilled its purpose. . . . " Id. at 489-490.).
Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 2: 1933-1990, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The strongest argument against the existence of a unique German path has always been that there is no such thing as a 'normal' western path of historical development. The British, French, and American paths were all unique. Still, the concept of 'western democracy' does point to one particular characteristic shared by all these states, a characteristic Germany lacked until 1945. Human and civil rights--in the tradition of the British habeas corpus act of 1679, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the declaration of human and civil rights by the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789--were anchored deeply enough in the political culture of the western democracies to make violations a public scandal and to drive forward the struggle for their further development. This tradition was not completely lacking in Germany, but it was weaker than that of the long-lived authoritarian state. To put it another way: the deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century is one of the main chapters in the prehistory of the 'German catastrophe', the years 1933-45." "Before 1945, for German philosophers, historians, and writers to speak of a separate German path meant to contrast German 'culture' with western 'civilization', to historically justify the German authoritarian state, and to reject western democracy as irreconcilable with Germanness. After 1945 the concept of a German Sonderweg underwent a radical transformation, prepared by German emigrants and catalyzed by the experience of Nazi rule. Now the idea stood for the historical deviation from the west that led to the 'German catastrophe'." Id. at 580.).
Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West, 1914-1945, translated from the German by Stewart Spencer (New Haven & London: Yale U.Press, 2015) ("The present examination of the course of German history between 1914 and 1945 should be seen as an attempt to explain how a country that is culturally a part of the West could so obstinately refuse to respect the West's normative project and the idea of inalienable human rights that it plunged not only itself but the rest of the world into a state that can be described only as catastrophic." Id. at xii. "In the final vote on 31 July 1919 a broad majority spoke out in favour of of the new constitution . . . Germany was now 'the most democratic democracy in the world'. Nowhere had democracy been as comprehensively and rigorously introduced as in this constitution. When the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Eduard David, hailed the adoption the Weimar constitution with these words on 31 July 1919, he was thinking about all of those provisions for direct democracy contained in the Republic's basic laws. The public at large reacted by noting the existence of the new constitution rather than by welcoming it with open arms, and it became a symbol of the Republic only in the wake of the campaign of hatred and violence waged by the extreme right. The gain in political freedom that the Weimar constitution brought the Germans was great, but the constitution contained no guarantee that that freedom would not be taken away again when things became difficult. The 'most democratic democracy in the world' was threatened not only by the forces that rejected and opposed it but also and above all by the fact that it was drafted in such a way that it could effectively abolish itself." Id. at 203-204. "Anti-Semitism was almost always synonymous with anti-modernism, anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism. It was this that made Weimar culture an elite project that was endangered from the outset, a culture that could vanish at a moment's notice." Id. at 238. "The Nuremberg Laws brought an end to Jewish emancipation and reduced the question of German identity to one of biology. It was clear declaration of war on culture in general and it not infrequently encountered support in Germany. Limiting Jewish influence by legal means found greater acceptance among Germans than unofficial demonstrations and acts of violence." Id. at 558. [Clearly the 'rule of law' can be a morally bankrupt as the 'rule of men.'] "The Holocaust had a prehistory that went beyond the history of anti-Semitism and racism and that cannot be separated from German history in general, the history of a largely western country whose traditional elites had until 1945 obstinately refused to open themselves up to the political culture of the West and which now had to suffer the consequences of this catastrophic policy." Id. at 888. "The holocaust made it clear to the world what ideological blindness could accomplish when harnessed to modern technology and when a country like Germany abandoned the rule of law, as it did in 1933. If the murder of European Jewry has left deeper scars on the collective conscience of the West than the millions of murders carried out by Stalin, then this is not only because the Shoah was unique in its chilling and mechanical efficiency by for another reason, too: this crime against humanity was committed by a nation that was part f western culture and that was judged, therefore, by western standards, This was at the heart of the 'German catastrophe' of which the historian Friedrich Meinecke spoke . . . " Id. at 916.).
Note: I often think, sadly and fearfully, that many Americans--perhaps even a majority--are naturally inclined and drawn toward an authoritarian state of the fascist mode.
Fascism in North America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Fascism in North America was composed of a set of related political movements in Canada, the United States, Mexico and elsewhere that were variants of fascism. Fascist movements in North America never realized power, unlike their counterparts in Europe. Although the geopolitical definition of North America varies, for the sake of convenience it can be assumed to include Central America and the Caribbean, where fascist variants also flourished."
"United States
In the so-called Business Plot in 1933 Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Congressional committee (the "McCormack- Committee") on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible.
"During the 1930s Virgil Effinger led the paramilitary Black Legion, a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan that sought a revolution to establish fascism in the USA.[2] Although responsible for a number of attacks, the Black Legion was very much a peripheral band of militants. More important were the Silver Legion of America, founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley, and the German American Bund, which emerged the same year from a number of older groups, including the Friends of New Germany and the Free Society of Teutonia. Both of these groups looked to Nazism for their inspiration.
"While these groups enjoyed some support, they were largely peripheral. Two other leaders, Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, sparked concern among some on the left at the time. However, Huey Long did not take on any such role because he was not a fascist. Father Charles Coughlin, who publicly endorsed fascism to an extent that Long never did, was unable to become involved in active politics because of his status as a priest.[3] Other fascists active in the US included the publisher Seward Collins, the broadcaster Robert Henry Best, the inventor Joe McWilliams and the writer Ezra Pound.
"In the modern United States, fascism is politically 'toxic'. It is understood that calling someone a fascist is an insult, and mainstream politicians will strongly dispute such a description as applied to themselves. Many politicians or movements have been accused of fascism, generally but not exclusively by those to the left of them. For example in 1966 Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel said of the Conservative movement, "A fanatical neo-fascist political cult in the GOP, driven by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear, who are recklessly determined to either control our party, or destroy it."
"Similarly, Donald Trump has been accused of fascism for proposals such as requiring Muslims to carry identification cards, creating a national registry of Muslims, and barring further Muslims from entering the country, as well as for his descriptions of Mexicans as "drug dealers" and "rapists," and his calls to deport approximately 25 Million Mexican-Americans, including full American citizens of Mexican descent whose families did not emigrate legally."
