The Rest is History Episode 298: The Nazis: Total Power (Part 4) Hitler was by now the head of the coalition government, but only he and two other Nazi members had cabinet positions. However, they had the police, the street gangs and the tacit support of conservatives behind them. Their immediate need was to square the army and to neutralize the left. In yet another election, Hitler needed to get a 2/3 majority to change the constitution and so they framed their election as a fight against Communism and Hitler unleashed his own stormtroopers. The Democrats did nothing and the Communists were paralyzed, but the Nazis didn’t know or believe that. Marius Van der Lubbe lit the Reichstag Fire, and although Tom and Dominic follow Richard Evans in believing that he was a lone actor, certainly the Nazis took advantage of the opportunity and arrested 400 people within hours. The next day Hindenberg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended all civil liberties. The election went ahead and the Nazis and their partners obtained 52% of the vote but this was still not sufficient to get the Enabling Act to change the constitution. So they overtook the local government structures, declared the Communist Party illegal and mounted a campaign of intimidation. With the Communist Party out of the way, they needed fewer than a 2/3 vote, and were able to obtain 444 votes in favour of the Enabling Act from liberals, Conservatives, and the Catholic centre, with only 94 against, mainly from the Social Democrats. This meant that Hitler could rule by decree. In April 1933 there was the first boycott of Jewish shops. The episode closed with a discussion between Tom and Dominic over the extent to which the Nazi rise to power forms an exemplar for other dictatorship. They rather optimistically assure themselves that lines would be drawn in future (huh! and how’s that working for us today with Trump?) and Tom thinks that any takeover in the future would be more subtle.
The Rest is Politics (US) Now that I’m tuning in to American politics again, watching this car crash in real time, I’m listening to Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci again. In their episode Trump’s Mafia World Order they spoke about a poster of the 14 Signs of Fascism that they said was at the American Holocaust Museum. It appears that it was not, but was instead taken from an op-ed called ‘Fascism Anyone’ by Lawrence W. Britt published in Free Inquiry,Vol 23 No. 2, the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Briefly, here are the 14 common threads that link Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
- Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
- Disdain for the importance of human rights.
- Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
- The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
- Rampant sexism.
- A controlled mass media.
- Obsession with national security.
- Religion and ruling elite tied together.
- Power of corporations protected
- Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
- Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
- Obsession with crime and punishment.
- Rampant cronyism and corruption
- Fraudulent elections
They mentioned an interesting new book that I might follow up on: Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind
The Coming Storm Series 2 Episode 6 Kompromat In this episode Gabriel Gatehouse returns to the purported paedophile ring that lay at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He looks at Jeffrey Epstein (and I must admit that I’ve always been uneasy about his ‘suicide’ in jail) and the way that his case has tentacles all over the political elite. It links to the wider conspiracy theory held by many Americans that democracy is a facade, and that the institutions of America, from politics to finance, from Hollywood to the secret intelligence agencies, are controlled by hidden hands. And whose might those hands be?
History Hit How World War I inspired Lord of the Rings. This episode features John Garth, an award-winning Tolkien biographer and author of Tolkien and the Great War. I always think of Tolkien as the quintessential Oxford don, but he was actually born in South Africa (then known as Orange Free State). He had returned to England with his mother when his father died in South Africa, and then when his mother died when he was 12, he was brought up by a Catholic priest. He went to a prestigious school in Birmingham, where he formed a close friendship with four other boys. When war was declared, two of them joined up immediately, but Tolkien finished his degree at Oxford before enlisting. As a university graduate, he was immediately made an officer. Even though the battalion he led was successful, he himself was not a good officer. Many features of WWI show up in his work- the trenches are evoked in Mordor, the flying creatures reflect the change that air power brought to WWI, and he based Sam Gamgee on his batmen (servants to officers) during the War. Underpinning the Lord of the Rings is the experience of Tolkien, as with other soldiers, of going into fearful situations.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 